Silent Souls
Director: Aleksey Fedorchenko
Year Released: 2010
Rating: 2.0
A man asks his friend, a photographer, to wrap up his dead wife's body and take her to the place where they had their honeymoon and cremate her body - they're following in the archaic traditions of their ancestors, which involves washing the corpse's body with vodka and taking two sparrows along with them for the last voyage. Though admirably grim and somber - a triumph of tone - on a human level it's a bit troubling, especially if one takes a feminist look at it: women's bodies are literally reduced to objects in this, from the dead wife to the prostitutes, which the men take up with as a way to 'console' themselves (yeah, right). It ends on an unsatisfying note, too, with the sparrows acting as the deus ex machina and conveniently sending the two leads to their own watery end.
