I am speaking to the Finnish film-maker Juho Kuosmanen, director of the prize-winning new film Compartment No 6, under conditions very different from our previous encounter at last autumn’s London film festival. That was a garrulous face-to-face chat about this film in the amiably chaotic surroundings of his central London distribution company. Now it’s our two subdued faces side-by-side on a computer screen, as we dwell on the fact that the phrase “third world war” used to be an essentially comic phrase, or category error, or a piece of intentionally ironic numerical wrongness like “sixth sense” or “fifth horseman of the apocalypse”.
Compartment No 6 is set in the spring of 1998, the era that Kuosmanen says was Russia’s hopeful moment, when Boris Nemtsov could have taken over from Boris Yeltsin as president. Laura, played by Seidi Haarla, is a lonely Finnish archaeology student, who is getting over an affair with her professor in Moscow, and takes a colossally long and arduous train journey to Murmansk in remote north-western Russia to study rock drawings there. She sits herself down in scuzzy compartment No 6, and finds herself opposite Ljoha, played by Yuriy Borisov, a drunk and obnoxious Russian guy who instantly starts pestering her. He appears awful. He is awful. And yet after this meet-uncute it becomes clear that he may not be so awful. It’s a wonderful and thoroughly engaging film whose romantic element remains complex and elusive right to the very end of their epic train journey.
