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THE STRINGER
Paul Pawlikowski, UK & Russia, 1998
Sunday 4 July 2004 11pm-12.30am
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Before he became celebrated as the director of the multi-award winning The Last Resort (2000), and notorious as the filmmaker who walked away from the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle, The Beekeeper's Daughter, Paul Pawlikowski was quietly crafting quirky, interesting features unfettered by the demands of commercialism.
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The Stringer is his first feature film and although strongly influenced by his past as a documentarist, it is essentially a traditional love story. Sergei Bodrov Jnr plays Vadik Chernyshov, an impoverished dreamer who spends his life drifting though Moscow with a video camera, hoping to shoot footage that will interest Western press agencies.
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The backdrop of Russian life elevates this above standard boy-meets-girl material
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However, he falls in love with the beautiful Helen (Anna Friel), an English media executive, and subsequently they must contend with the barriers that their different backgrounds present. As such, it's a tale as old and romantic as Romeo and Juliet, but the backdrop of Russian life, with all the richness which Pawlikowski so perfectly captures, elevates this above standard boy-meets-girl material.
Anna Friel shines at her naturalistic best, effortlessly attractive and remarkably assured in her debut feature film, despite the toughness of the shoot. "I was completely on my own for eight weeks living in one of those Stalinist blocks in Moscow," she recalls, "With mafia guys calling me, asking me for sex. I was just 19". Russian heartthrob Sergei Bodrov Jnr plays Vadik with a combination of feckless charm and weary cynicism, and Vladimir Ilyin gives an unrestrained performance as the dark and eccentric Yavorsky.
The Stringer proves an ambitious mixture of genres - romance, thriller, and political satire, with a touch of noir courtesy of Vadik's voice-overs. But its pace and unpredictability ensure that Pawlikowski's first feature made an arresting and effective debut, announcing with gusto the arrival of a new kid on the Eastern bloc.
Gavin Collinson
Previous films on BBC Four
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