How I Ended This Summer (2010)

Russian director Alexei Popogrebsky's "How I Ended This Summer" is a tense, stunning and often frustrating marathon of film. This is an award winning film having claimed the Golden Bear at The Berlin International Film Festival and best film at the London Film Festival Awards, and certainly provides a unique cinematic experience with its stunning landscapes and minimal use of dialogue and soundtrack.

The film follows the stark lives of two Russian meteorologists, working on an inhospitable and isolated wasteland on the Siberian coast. College student Pavel is on a work placement, attempting to work alongside experienced and intimidating Sergei. The environment itself is the source of much of the cinematic beauty but also deadly hazards: polar bears, radioactivity, sheer cliffs, and wild weather. These hazards, and the abhorrent isolation takes its toll on immature Pavel who becomes unable to communicate with Sergei. The tension reaches breaking point when Pavel loses Sergei's trust and is unable to bring himself to tell him the news that his family has died in a car accident.

Where this film excels is in scene depiction, with every view a stunning image symbolic of Pavel's temperament. Almost every image in this film could be a photograph worthy of framing. The landscape is stark, the soundtrack is almost nonexistent, as is the dialogue, and it forces the viewer to experience Pavel's toxic isolation.

But to be perfectly honest, I have never been more frustrated watching a film than when I endured the two hours of silence that is "How I Ended This Summer". Several times throughout the film you are forced to spend over a minute watching a character walk off into the distance, and all this with no music, no dialogue, not even anything to think about. For a while I even played music in the background just to maintain sanity. To add to this frustration, our main character Pavel is an irritating young man who constantly makes mistakes, is completely devoid of any courage, seems to have no interests and makes every wrong decision he possibly can.

Perhaps it is this very frustration that makes this film award winningly unique. Popogrebski outstandingly succeeds in communicating the feelings of young Pavel, even if it at times this process is excruciatingly painful. "How I Ended This Summer" is a film for film buffs. To anyone else wanting to endure this marathon I would suggest multitasking with some knitting or doing some pushups, otherwise you could expect to be footing the bill for the screen you just threw your drink at.

Fmovies: I have never watched a Russian film before and I was not sure what I was going to be in for with this film, but I was pleasantly surprised! The story line is fresh, simple but very effective, it is filmed well and the music/sound is very well done to really give this particular feel to my first watched Russian film.

Hollywood could pick this film up, change a few things to the story line, add a few well known actors in the mix and they would have a winner on their hands, Hollywood has been doing it for years, but damn I hope they don't do it with this film, as I think it is great the way it is.

Give it a go, no special effects, no blood and guts, just a good solid drama, with great decor to boot! 8 out of 10

This film geniusly reflects the complex of difficulties existed in the relationship "humans-nature". Kamchatka is amazing place to be in Russia, Kamchatka in this movie is twice amazing. Dobrygin perfectly transfers quite common for contemporary Russia typical Russian guy image in the age of 22-27 - a bit disoriented in the space, introverted, frustrated, oriented to the pleasures of life more than on the help to other people. His acting is perfect and hi is hot. The other character is made also successfully. There are a lot of such men in the age of 40-45 who are much stronger than Dobrygin's generation because they experienced the market transformations in early 90s. Thus they think they know everything and often use authoritative way of behavior. The conflict of generations, isolation issue, nature and humans..These is not full list of topics highlighted by the movie.

How I Ended This Summer fmovies. How i ended this summer was the winner of the 2010 London film festival award and it also won many other awards from around the world and quite rightly so in my opinion.

Two men of different generations , who work on a an Arctic weather station , come to blows when the younger man has to tell his colleague of a family tragedy but fears the consequences of telling him.

This film will not appeal to everyone. It's a Russian film directed by Aleksei Popogrebsky and although subtitled , does not really depend on a large amount of dialogue to tell the story.

It starts of at a slow pace and as the film progresses , the tension builds to the point that it gets the viewer angry as to the decisions that are being made. Why doesn't the young man tell his elder the news? Is he really that scared of him? What will happen when he finds out?

This is a film about human relationships and vulnerability .

Apart from the tense story , it looks superb too and i only hope lots of people give this film a chance because they wont regret it.

Two men man an isolated weather station in the Arctic circle. Sergei is older and experienced with a wife and son at home. Pavel is young and bored, resentful of Sergei's dominance yet dependent on it. Into this already tense environment comes the news that Sergei's wife and son were badly injured in an accident. Pavel receives the message while Sergei is out fishing. Because of the way things play out, Pavel doesn't deliver the message right away; as the opportune moment passes him by, it becomes harder and harder to tell Sergei even while the direness of his screw up becomes more and more obvious. Eventually, hostilities boil over and Pavel's paranoia reaches such a crescendo that he takes off into the wilderness on a self-imposed cat and mouse chase, convinced that Sergei wants to kill him.

It's almost ludicrous that something that really is at heart pretty banal (failing to deliver a message, even if that message is very serious) could trigger events that reach the conclusion they do (I won't spoil it, but the end to this movie is grim, folks). But the movie is so well made and acted that everything is entirely plausible, and it's easy to see how distrust can so easily grow when given the right conditions.

My understanding is that both actors won German film prizes for their work, and no wonder. Until the final scene, not another human being appears, and it falls to the two of them to hold our attention with nothing more than a stark if beautiful landscape to act against.

Well hold it they do.

Grade: A

"Kak ya provyol etim letom" (Russian title contains intentional misspell-pin and should be read "How I Cheated (somebody) Last Summer", not just this school-like "How I Spent Last Summer", chosen for foreign version) is a Russian psychological drama about two meteorologists, the old, Sergei, and the young, Pavel, who get stuck on an isolated polar station for a regular season work and have to deal with each other ...and the information, that arrives from the "big earth".

Visually and stylistically film is flawless. Cinematography with it's slow-pacing, static long shots and scenic wild nature shots is adorable. Atmosphere, when time seems ticking slower and cold wind awaits for you from another side of the door, is on the good level too. And as a native-speaker, I can say that dialogue-lines are also pretty decent. Polar station as a place is just a cause for examination of human communication (so-called "chemistry") in isolated space. Subject deals with responsibility, instinct of self-preservation, influence of isolated space to human psychics and importance of experience. I don't want to spoil your first-time-watching, so I won't go into plot any further...

Can't name any similarities. Maybe the closest will be: "Breaking the Waves" meets "Gerry" and "Shutter Island" (no delusions here, similarity is geographical) along with Russian "Dikoe Pole" (2008) and maybe even "Kukushka" (2002). Plus some Michael Haneke's style (like from most recently - though black and white - "Das Weisse Band" with it's distant human behavior examination). In my opinion, "Kak ya provyol etim letom" is one of the best Russian movies of the decade (2000-2010) along with Alexei Balabanov's "Gruz 200", "Morfiy" and above-mentioned Alexander Rogozhkin's "Kukushka". And yes, it is way better than Zvyagintsev's pretentious force-fed Tarkovsky-styled issues "Vozvraschenie" & "Izgnanie".

Don't know how soon those of you who don't speak Russian will be available to watch this with subtitles or voice-over...

So, if you're often bored with 2-hour non-action movies - don't bother watching this. Try something more entertaining. But if you're into slow-paced minimalistic psychological dramas, give it a try. You'll be aesthetically rewarded.

8-8,510.