"Mr. Nobody Against Putin"
Culture | Back Story
An Oscar-nominated documentary goes behind enemy lines
“Mr Nobody Against Putin” takes on patriotism, propaganda and the limits of sympathy
When suffering is abundant, compassion can be scarce—especially for countries that inflict the pain. “Mr Nobody Against Putin”, a documentary that won a BAFTA and is up for an Oscar on March 15th, is ostensibly a study in propaganda and patriotism. Its real power, however, comes from its approach to a perennial challenge: whether and how to elicit sympathy for people on the wrong side.
A town of 10,000 souls in the Ural mountains, Karabash squats like a prison camp amid straggly birch trees, slag heaps and smokestacks. Its Soviet-era apartment blocks have rickety balconies and exposed pipework. Snows thaw to reveal rutted roadways and cracked concrete. Life expectancy is dismal. It is a useful corrective to the impression made by glitzy downtown Moscow on suggestible visitors. Far more Russians live in bleak places like this, expecting little from the state and getting less.
Karabash is thoroughly unlovable. Yet Pavel Talankin, the endearingly goofy protagonist and narrator of “Mr Nobody”, loves it anyway. The maze of pipes at the copper plant, the cryogenic winters—he describes them tenderly as a sonneteer might his idol’s blemishes. He loves Russia too, he tells the camera to which, after the onslaught on Ukraine in 2022, he confides his spiralling gloom. Maybe he loves it more than do Vladimir Putin’s fans: “Love for your country means saying, ‘We have a problem’.”
When the tanks start rolling, the propaganda kicks in. Mr Talankin is the videographer at Karabash’s school; to prove it is complying with Kremlin diktats, he films the pupils singing patriotic songs and honouring the flag, and teachers declaiming lies about history and the war. A colleague struggles to pronounce “denazification”, the word as clunky as it is misleading. Another rails slaveringly against parasites and spies, his latent jingoism unleashed. With ingrained Russian fatalism, Mr Talankin’s mother, the school librarian, keeps her head down and thinks he should, too.
Instead, he resigns, because “Even a guy like me should have some principles.” But after making contact with a documentarian abroad, he unresigns, resolving to “film the abyss this school is sinking into”. He records visiting mercenaries from the Wagner Group showing the children how to spot landmines. Boys compete in grenade-throwing contests. Everyone is obliged to spout gobbledygook, a lesson in subservience in itself.
Before long, the war comes home. Early in the narrative, Mr Talankin warns a student not to flunk out, lest he wind up perishing in Ukraine. Soon young men are conscripted. Then they start dying: a favourite pupil’s brother; an old classmate of Mr Talankin’s. He tapes the wailing of the dead man’s mother at the funeral.
It is tough to listen to, and hard to know what to feel, as is often the case with an aggressor’s woe. During the historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel) of the 1980s, for example, West German thinkers debated the proper way to depict the plight of German soldiers on the Eastern Front in the second world war. Some thought their resistance of the Red Army should be recalled with dignity; others, such as Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher, insisted that they enabled and prolonged the Nazi evil.
Time can ease the awkwardness. In “Letters from Iwo Jima”, released in 2006, Clint Eastwood, the movie’s director, evoked the desperation of Japanese soldiers in the eponymous battle—six decades on. The youth and fear of those enlisted into a guilty cause is clearer at a distance. As Ukrainians endure daily terror bombings, for many people it is, understandably, too soon for anguish over the predicament of Russians.
Mr Talankin understands that. By the summer of 2024 the police are on to him. Rattled, he says goodbye to his mother—a classic exile’s farewell, in which nothing much is said and nothing much needs to be—and leaves Karabash, perhaps for ever. Despite the wrench, he knows such burdens do not compare to the catastrophe in Ukraine, and says so.
The tribulations in his footage are not what lingers, nor even its chronicle of brainwashing and tyranny’s throttle. Rather it is the poignant, humanising ordinariness. Their curriculum is deranged, but the students, some possibly doomed, are just like students everywhere. They mooch in corridors and get candyfloss stuck on their fingers. Girls fix their hair as boys peacock. Teenagers smooch at a graduation party. Facing the sympathy problem, this film follows an old artistic rule: show, don’t tell.■
An Oscar-nominated documentary goes behind enemy lines
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