Cannes

Shultes

 (Russia)

In line with film's info-withholding strategy, auds learn very little until the end about protagonist Lyosha Shultes (Gela Chitava), a strapping, self-contained man in his 20s who regularly goes out running and spends his evenings watching TV (but talking very little) with his sick mother (Lubov Firsova).

In between the bookends of these daily rituals, he works as a pickpocket with a gang of car thieves, although he also practices his skill on travelers in the subway for extra cash. Seeing a young boy of 10 or so named Kostik (Ruslan Grebenkin) swiping a stranger's wallet on the bus, Shultes recruits him into the gang. Although he teaches Kostik the tricks of the trade, and lets the kid download a silly pop song onto his cellphone, their relationship remains strictly professional.

Even when Shultes' mother dies, he doesn't tell anyone about it, not even his own brother (Vadim Suslov), who's stationed at an army base not far from Moscow. But when he sees one of his pickpocketing victims (Cecile Piege) at a hospital, Shultes' sense of guilt is tweaked and he decides to investigate her life further. Breaking into her flat, he watches a DV letter she shot for an unknown lover (a strangely entrancing interlude in which character mimes along to a ballad in order to express her amorous feelings), and something stirs in Shultes, paving the way for revelations about his own backstory.

The helmer appears so wary of letting any sentimentality sully the pic's story, that he risks losing the aud's emotional engagement. However, tension is craftily built into the will-he-or-won't-he-get-caught nature of the script, and protag grows more intriguing as pic progresses. Lead thesp Chitava keeps his perf deadpan, but still makes for a compelling presence.

Featuring very little dialogue, and a lensing style that mixes long handheld traveling shots and static takes in which characters do remarkably little, pic feels much more like European art cinema than Russian (the latter's specialist pics tend to be more florid, symbolic and sometimes outright weird).

Camera (color), Nikolai Vavilov, Marina Gornostaeva; editor, Serik Beyseuov; production designer, Kirill Shuvalov; costume designer, Vladimir Kouptsov; sound (Dolby Digital), Arseni Troitski. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight), May 23, 2008. Running time: 103 MIN.