Compartment Number 6 Movie Storyline. A young Finnish woman escapes an enigmatic love affair in Moscow by boarding a train to the arctic port of Murmansk. Forced to share the long ride and a tiny sleeping car with a Russian miner, the unexpected encounter leads the occupants of Compartment no. 6 to face the truth about their own yearning for human connection.
Compartment No. 6 (Finnish: Hytti nro 6; Russian: Купе номер шесть) is a 2021 internationally co-produced drama film co-written and directed by Juho Kuosmanen, starring Seidi Haarla and Yuri Borisov, based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Rosa Liksom. The film was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. It shared the Grand Prix with Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. It was selected as the Finnish submission for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards and was one of the 15 “shortlisted” films in the category but was not nominated for the Oscar.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 89% of 47 critics’ reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The website’s consensus reads, “Compartment No. 6 can get a little stuffy within its narrative confines, but this well-acted, subtly told love story rewards the viewer’s patience.” Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 79 out of 100 based on 18 critics, indicating “generally favorable reviews”.
Film Review for Compartment Number 6
After winning the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar in 2016 for his bracingly original boxing drama, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, gifted Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen graduates to the main competition with Compartment No. 6, an Arctic road movie that on the surface seems completely different. And yet these two films are flipsides of similar themes.
The protagonist of Kuosmanen’s debut feature was a modest country baker serenely content with his place in the world, making him an odd fit for competitive sports. The new film revolves around a woman trying on the kind of cultured life she has tasted and admired, before ultimately finding peace through simpler self-knowledge and acceptance.
Taking its title from the confined quarters of a second class sleeping car on a train from Moscow to the Arctic port city of Murmansk, this is a melancholic drama but also one that’s unexpectedly uplifting in its insights into human solitude and connection. As dour as it often seems with its reek of stale booze and cigarette smoke, there’s joy here for patient audiences willing to find it, and to forgo the easy consolations of a more conventional outcome.
The time is unspecified but clearly in the post-Soviet era, with analog devices like a camcorder and a Walkman cassette player suggesting the 1990s still stuck in the ‘80s. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a student from Finland studying Russian in Moscow, where she has been renting a room from Irina (Dinara Drukarova), the high-spirited woman who has become her lover. A single scene at the start shows the consuming impression on unworldly, slightly awkward Laura of Irina’s endless parties in a charming old apartment full of music and art and books and laughter, where guests bat philosophical ideas back and forth as they toss back vodka shots.
One thought that stays with Laura is “It’s easier to understand the present if you study the past.” That notion is part of her desire, as a budding archeology enthusiast, to travel to Murmansk and see the ancient petroglyphs on the rocky coast. She and Irina originally planned the trip together, but when Irina was forced to cancel because of work, Laura decided to go anyway.
She finds herself sharing a train compartment with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), an uncouth Russian miner whose obnoxious manner promises to make the long journey even longer. He’s antagonistic toward the tourist, drunkenly extolling the virtues of his homeland: “Russia is a great country! We beat the Nazis. The moon. We went there!” Laura kills time in the dining car and returns to find him smashed and rowdy, his behavior so offensive that she tries to slip the indifferent conductor (Julia Aug, marvelously affectless) some cash to find her another compartment. She even briefly considers the overcrowded bunks of third class. Only once Ljoha has passed out does she get some rest.
Compartment Number 6 (2022)
Directed by: Juho Kuosmanen
Starring: Seidi Haarla, Yuriy Borisov, Dinara Drukarova, Julia Aug, Lidia Kostina, Tomi Alatalo, Viktor Chuprov, Denis Pyanov, Polina Aug, Natalya Drozd, Galina Petrova, Lidia Kostina
Screenplay by: Andris Feldmanis, Livia Ulman, Juho Kuosmanen, inspired by the novel by Rosa Liksom.
Production Design by: Kari Kankaanpää
Cinematography by: Jani-Petteri Passi
Film Editing by: Jussi Rautaniemi
Costume Design by: Jaanus Vahtra
Set Decoration by: Igor Lobankov
Art Direction by: Vyacheslav Kishkun, Dina Logvinova
MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual references.
Distributed by: B-Plan Distribution (Finland), Sony Pictures Releasing (Russia)
Release Date: July 10, 2021 (Cannes), January 26, 2022 (United States)
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