'Compartment No 6' Movie Review: A Gem from Start to ‘Finnish’

Language: Finnish/Russian

Funny, how you can almost smell a great film from the very first frame.  Not this time, though. The opening montage shows a crowd of pseudo-intellectuals in a cosy apartment    humiliating one another at a dinner get-together in Moscow by asking to identify quotes of great litterateurs.

I wouldn’t want to spend an evening with these culture vultures. Neither does Laura (Saidi Haarla) who we soon get to know, is our protagonist. Stifled in the social gathering and, we soon become aware, in a lesbian relationship with a woman who seems to be the opposite of Laura: gregarious, ambitious, eager to please those who are important, Laura is ready for a change, although she doesn’t know it.

We can sense exactly where this is going as Laura boards a train from Moscow to Murmansk we can sense her restlessness, anxiety and even boredom in a relationship that has had its day. So, we all know what will happen next, right?  Right. The obnoxious stranger in the train, nothing like the one whom Tanuja met in Hamrahi four decades ago, far more toxic and sinister the stranger starts his conversation by chattily asking Laura if she is a sex worker. The stranger, and by now you should know his name is Lyokha(Yuri Borisov) puts the  question far  more crudely.

At this point I wondered the same thing that Laura did: how is she going spend the next three to four days in the same compartment as this obnoxious man? While doling out the theme of the comfort of the familiar when a character is placed in the discomfort of the unfamiliar, Compartment No 6 never ceases to venture into areas of human interaction that are padlocked and forbidden. There is an exquisite pain secreted at the heart of the relationship that grows between our heroine and the rude stranger. You will never know where that pain comes from, or goes. Director Juho Kuosmanen leaves the relationship in a zone of bewildering ambivalence. Not the kind where you don’t know if the two will be together finally, but a far deeper place where you are left wondering what binds these two strangers together: one gay and the other straight, one hurt the other gone beyond feeling anything or is just the opposite:  Lyokha hurts so much it has ceased to manifest itself in his behaviour?

Questions riddles and the conundrum of the dynamics that defines the man-woman relationship of course through the veins of this vital and vigorous take on what it takes to “know” someone without probing for a common ground. Your favourite moment in the wonderful charming mischievous and pained film would be everyone’s favourite moment. It occurs just before the journey ends. But the best is yet to come. The re-appearance of Lyokha shocks Laura as much as us. Is there something to this bonding that transcends the conventions of love and romance? Something a lot deeper than words or feelings that define mutual empathy? Will we ever know why two strangers become so close that they can hear each other’s heartbeats?

I was baffled by the enigma that envelopes this tale of strangers who bond on a train. Their emotions are so tenebrous it’s like staring into a tunnel where the light is visible but barely. With the two main actors delivering performances so subtle shaded and muted, it is the opposite of bravura, Compartment No 9 will make you hanker for a journey inward into yourself to ask that one question which haunts most of us all our lives. What makes life worth living?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.