Gadkie lebedi

The Ugly Swans is the third film I have seen from director Konstantin Lopushansky, a protégé of Andrei Tarkovsky. The other two films, A Visitor to the Museum and Letters from a Dead Man, were both indebted to Tarkovsky's visual style. The Ugly Swans is less so. Furthermore, its story (based on a novel by the Strugatskiy brothers) is told in a more straight forward fashion, although not every point is spelled out for the viewer.

Like A Visitor to the Museum, The Ugly Swans follows a man on a journey. In this case, the protagonist is an established fiction writer who is part of a U.N. team. The team's destination is Tashlinsk, a town that has been cut off from the rest of the world. Rain pours continually over the town and an unexplained infrared light coats the landscape with a red tint (shades of A Visitor to the Museum). Strange psychic creatures known as "wetters" control the area and mostly reside in a boarding school for gifted children. What are "Wetters"? What do they want? Why does the weather never change? These are the questions that the U.N. team have come to answer. The writer has a personal stake: His daughter is at the school.

The Ugly Swans does not have the same hypnotic quality as Letters from a Dead Man or A Visitor to the Museum. Despite this the film features some great individual scenes: The crossing of a no-man's-land, a flooded restaurant open for business, and a powerful ending. Storywise, I was reminded of Children of the Damned in the way Lopushansky portrays the students at the school. The Russian film is more ambiguous than the British film and may be harder from some to enjoy. However, fans of cerebral science fiction films should be intrigued by The Ugly Swans, which is available on a Ruscico DVD.