CANNES 2024: Limonov: The Ballad about Eddie

     Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie by Kirill Serebrennikov - the film is based on Emmanuel Carrère's famous book "Limonov",  a romantic mixture of facts and speculations about  Eduard Limonov, the Russian radical, poet, dissident, emigré, returnee, detainee, bête noire and cause célèbre who in 1993 co-founded the ultra-nationalist National Bolshevik Party.

    Here are the zigzags of Limonov’ many lives: from Kharkov underground poet's circle to Moscow,  Paris, New York  and finally return  to Gorbachev's USSR.

    Serebrennikov uses not only Carrère's text, but also narrative strands from the novel “It’s Me, Eddie,” by Limonov himself.

 The director of the film is  attracted by the young Limonov, a romantic (in this sense, the film is close to his film “Summer” about rock musicians in early 1980th). It is important for him to understand how adrenaline fever grows from romanticism, how despair and desperate desire to experience everything in life twist the life. And above all – what are the origins of anger, extremism, aggression.

     Limonov by Ben Whishaw is a chameleon: charming and disgusting, rude, gentle, funny, boorish, imbued with the energy of punk rock. He resembles elusive character of a picaresque novel.

   One of the longest episodes in the movies was filmed almost in one shot. Eddie rushes about, wandering from room to room, from the kitchen to – suddenly - an empty cinema hall, from Moscow flat to 42th street in NY... until, finally, he finds himself on a gigantic theatre set. In fact, his race/drive is a neurotic search for reality, which every time turns out to be a just a stage set.

   The screenplay, co-written by Serebrennikov with Ben Hopkins and Paweł Pawlikowski, introduces a punk anarchist who, despite having to take humiliating jobs, didn’t want to sell out and become comfortably smug. But in order to keep the rebellious free spirit alive he turns to paramilitary extremism.