‘Limonov: The Ballad’ Review: Ben Whishaw Is The Slippery Star Of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Exhilarating Punk-Poet Biopic – Cannes Film Festival
deadline.comIn the Moscow Times’ obituary for Eduard Limonov, who died four years ago aged 77, writer Mark Galeotti summed up the poet-turned-politician in two simple sentences: “Was Limonov a visionary or a poser, an artist or a politician, a leftist or a rightist?
The answer to all of them is, of course, yes.” This is key to understanding Kirill Serebrennikov’s latest movie, a boundary-blasting biopic that simply drips with punk-rock energy, revealing everything and nothing about a slippery character whose modus operandi was reinvention from the get-go and for whom consistency really was the hobgoblin of small minds.
Limonov, the poet, fits into a long line of miscreant artists, such as writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, who co-wrote the manifesto of the Russian Futurist group (“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”) in 1912, and Dziga Vertov, the avant-garde director whose Man with a Movie Camera (1929) changed the face of documentary altogether.
Serebrennikov’s film draws on both these visionaries, and the result is a film that just won’t behave itself, taking the political rock operatics of his 2018 film Summer to exciting new extremes.
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