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Of Freaks and Men [imdb] [viff] Dir: Alexei Balabanov Country: Russia

I can't recall immediately how often Russian films get released in Canada so I did not want to pass up the chance to see one during the festival. The subject of the film being pornographers at the turn-of-the-century in no way influenced the choice, of course.

Of Freaks and Men is visually striking. The sepia-toned look combined with the almost constantly empty cityscape frame an ominous world where the surface beauty is being infested with an age-old darkness and the new technology of motion pictures is there to document it.

This is not a sugar-coated fable of society's vices, the pornographers in the story are quite clearly evil. But the film also makes the viewer complicit to a degree as it gradually changes tone from the titillating to the sick. Perhaps the only fault of the film's visual style is that its artificiality allows the viewer that extra level of distancing from the images.