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‘Limonov: The Ballad’ Review: Ben Whishaw Stars in a Portrait of a Radical That Is All Swagger and No Game
Ben Whishaw stars in Kirill Serebrennikov's "Limonov: The Ballad," a showily unconvincing mythologization of the famed Russian radical's messy life.
Chapter titles, rendered in faux Soviet-propaganda-poster font slam across the image as Limonov ( Ben Whishaw), smirking in a stars and stripes shirt, announces in heavily accented English (the lingua franca of the movie no matter the actual language of the speaker) “I am an independent communist.” Time frames and aspect ratios shuttle back and forth: first we spring forward to a Moscow press conference that Eddie — as he likes to be called — is giving upon his return from exile in the Glasnost era. The inertia is increased by DP Roman Vasyanov’s curiously sluggish camera movement, by a Brechtian reality break and by the rather obvious movie references that Serebrennikov shoehorns in, to the point of having a young girl in a wide hat leaning in at the window of a yellow taxicab as Eddie and Elena exit the porn theater. Instead, we get a ploddingly literal use of hip signifiers such as a character saying “Take a walk on the wild side” in a movie that actually uses the Lou Reed song as a cue, a repetition of the “Taxi Driver” reference in case anyone missed it first time around, and a pride in the punk soundtrack as an indicator of edginess that doesn’t really gel in an age when you can buy Ramones T-shirts in H&M.
Or read this on Variety
