‘Limonov: The Ballad’: Cannes Review

Dir. Kirill Serebrennikov. Italy/France/Spain 2024. 138mins.

The word ‘ballad’ in the title of Kirill Serebrennikov’s new film is telling. Limonov: The Ballad resembles those long ironic narrative poems of the 19th century, à la Lord Byron or, more germanely, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Based on the life of 20th century Soviet writer and controversialist Eduard Limonov, Serebrennikov’s English-language film is a rambling, unruly, picaresque yarn, its feel of chaos perfectly evoking the character of its mercurial protagonist.

A rambling, unruly, picaresque yarn

Originally planned as a project for writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski, credited as co-writer and exec producer, the film is executed very much in the breakneck style of Leto, Serebrennikov’s 2018 film about the USSR rock scene, and in spirit it is just as much a rock ‘n’ roll movie. The most accomplished film yet from the Russian director, Limonov is a bracingly entertaining piece that should draw international attention on the strength of its central figure’s cult repute (he was the subject of an acclaimed 2011 non-fiction novel by French author Emmanuel Carrère) and of a mesmerising, protean lead by Ben Whishaw.

Poet, punk, exile, political leader… Limonov lived many lives, although much of what he said about himself has been contested as questionable self-mythologising – which only adds to his mystique. Born Eduard Savenko, he took the name ‘Limonov’, a play on both ‘lemon’ and the Russian slang for ‘hand grenade’. He is seen at the start as an exile returning to Russia in the perestroika period, setting the tone for the picture of a man who was always a contrarian and a self-styled eternal outsider.

A worker in a Kharkov (now Kharkiv), Ukraine SSR smelting plant in 1969, ‘Edichka’ (Eddie) Liminov is seen reading his angry youthful poetry at a writers’ soiree, where he rages against a complacent older bard who tells him to be happy with his life in the provinces. Instead, Limonov heads for Moscow, where naturally he hates just about everyone, but falls for Elena (Beanpole star Viktoria Miroshnichenko), a glamorous beauty supposedly out of his league. He courts her by offering to hand stitch her a pair of jeans, and they become lovers – and stay together after her powerful beau punches Limonov in the face.

A self-published writer working outside the Writers Union system, but contemptuous of revered dissidents Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, Limonov falls foul of the authorities, but is allowed to leave the USSR. He and Elena arrive in New York in 1975, where he swans around in a white rock star suit and she becomes a successful model. But eventually she drifts away, money runs out, and Limonov goes into a depressive tailspin, wandering the streets and eventually having a night of rough sex with a homeless man. Somehow he then becomes butler to a wealthy New York industrialist, and later winds up in Paris, where he achieves literary success with books such as his autobiographical It’s Me, Eddie. Lionised by French cultural circles, he is interviewed on the radio (by Sandrine Bonnaire), where he derides literature, praises Stalin and punches one of his interlocutors. 

Limonov comes across as a man in a state of permanent, undirected revolt, at different points raging against Communism, dissidents, US capitalism, Western romanticism about the USSR. Limonov’s strangest period, and the hardest to explain, was his founding in 1993 of the National Bolshevik Party, a Russian opposition organisation that seemed to combine elements of far-left and far-right ideology, and that here comes across as a sort of neo-punk skinhead boys’ club – seeming to embody a lifelong career of provocation and posturing as a form of performance art. 

Certainly the film comes across in its revved-up, fragmented, ramshackle way as a modern Russian epic – with Limonov as a unique anomalous individual, yet at the same time somehow exemplifying the contradictions and neuroses of a tormented modern nation. He also comes across as a human, flawed figure, self-aggrandising, self-pitying, sometimes helplessly romantic. Whether we can fully understand Limonov – and some of his more aberrant characteristics, such as his support for Russia’s annexation of the Donbass region, noted in an end title – is another matter.

Throughout, Whishaw’s characterisation is a tour de force, his Limonov sometimes grandiose and monstrous, sometimes tender and even ridiculous, but what’s remarkable is how successfully he sews together all the different registers of an elusive figure. All this, and with a convincing Russian accent. 

A film of fragments – echoing the collage style of punk fanzines, with chapter titles in bold letters and dashes of scrappy animation, as per Leto - Limonov crackles with energy. In particular, DoP Roman Vasyanov and editor Yuriy Karikh make the most of Vlad Ogay’s New York street sets (the film was shot substantially in Riga), which are worked and reworked to bustling effect. Later sections lag slightly, although there is an commanding, thoughtful appearance by British veteran Donald Sumpter, as Limonov’s USSR-nostalgic dad. Music is used to pointed effect, although rock traditionalists may wince at some counter-intuitively restyled Velvet Underground covers by Russian band Shortparis.