Saint Louis International Film Festival: How I Ended This Summer

In his 2003 feature film debut, Roads to Koktebel, Russian writer-director Aleksei Popogrebsky employed the conventions of the road movie to explore the cruel challenges, unforeseen turns, and deflating disappointments of life. Popogrebksy is a filmmaker engrossed with the gritty tangibles of human experience on the margins, where repulsive perils, petty mistakes, and capricious twists of fate can derail the best-laid plans. Such concerns are given a frigid, fearsome airing in his latest feature, How I Ended This Summer, which was nominated for a Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film International Festival, and arrives locally this month at the Stella Artois St. Louis International Film Festival.

With a diffident nod to Hitchcock, Summer presents the most elemental of psychological thriller recipes: place two people in a remote setting, stir in some personal friction, add a crisis, and watch as the pot boils over. Here the players are Pavel (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a recent college graduate with a negligent manner, and Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis), an older, humorless worker bee. For the duration of a nightless Arctic summer, the pair have been contracted to staff a forlorn Soviet-era meteorological research station, where they spend sprawling days maintaining field instruments and reporting data back to a command center via short-wave radio and satellite. The precise nature of their research is never clarified, but the specifics aren’t salient to Popogrebsky’s tale. The story is, at bottom, about the conflict between these two men, and the cascade of moral missteps and bad luck that drags them both down into a frozen hell.

Relaxed and sloppy in his approach to their dreary responsibilities, Pavel is visibly exasperated by Sergei, whose dour criticisms and simmering temper put the younger man on edge. The film’s pivotal moment occurs when Pavel receives a distressing dispatch over the radio, an urgent message for Sergei that will doubtlessly devastate the man.  For reasons that remain obscure—out of fearful spite, to obfuscate his research errors, or for no good cause at all—Pavel initially withholds the message from Sergei… and then keeps on withholding it.  What begins as a foolish ethical blunder quickly spirals into outright fiasco, as Pavel must pile deception on top of deception in order to conceal the truth from the volatile Sergei and his distant superiors.

Pavel lacks the courage to halt the snowballing debacle that he has put into motion, but he is ultimately more puzzling than pitiable. Scrutinizing his characters’ motives is not central to Popogrebsky’s approach. Instead, the director focuses on portraying with harrowing intimacy the panicked tunnel vision that can overtake anyone when errors compound upon errors. Pavel’s guilt and desperation suffuse every frame of the film, as it marches towards a bloody, borderline farcical final act, with Mother Nature herself acting as a wild card and third-party antagonist. Ravenous polar bears, freezing water, obscuring fog, broken wastelands, and the invisible fire of radiation all become devils that seem to punish Pavel for his sins. Ultimately, Popogrebsky’s film presents a ruthless evaluation of humanity’s frailties, wherein short-sighted malice and aimless terror consistently trump reason, probity, and dignity.

St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival; check out his blog for further coverage of this year’s SLIFF.