It’s been a few years now since “Ida” won over critics, took home an Oscar, and established Pawel Pawlikowski as one to watch. It looks like the director is getting ready to have a big 2018, not only with the arrival of “Cold War” (one of our most anticipated movies of the upcoming twelve months), but with another film that is going in front of the cameras.
Variety reports that Pawlikowski will helm “Limonov,” based on the book “Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia” by Emmanuele Carrere. That title pretty much says all you need to know about this tale concerning the dissident poet, but the synopsis of the book gives a pretty good idea of what you’ll be in for:
This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: “Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire’s butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes. He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgment on the matter. It’s a dangerous life, an ambiguous life: a real adventure novel. It is also, I believe, a life that says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about all our history since the end of the Second World War.”
So Eduard Limonov isn’t fictional-but he might as well be. This pseudobiography isn’t a novel, but it reads like one: from Limonov’s grim childhood to his desperate, comical, ultimately successful attempts to gain the respect of Russia’s literary intellectual elite; to his immigration to New York, then to Paris; to his return to the motherland. Limonov could be read as a charming picaresque. But it could also be read as a troubling counternarrative of the second half of the twentieth century, one that reveals a violence, an anarchy, a brutality, that the stories we tell ourselves about progress tend to conceal.
It certainly sounds like an exciting gear shift for the filmmaker, and he’s ready to roll up his sleeves and direct “Limonov” in 2018, with casting for the lead role underway. As for “Cold War,” no release date, but I’d bank on a Cannes premiere.