This Finnish-Russian co-production garnered a first prize at Cannes and very good reviews on IMdB and Rotten tomatoes. The plot is weak. A young Finnish woman, an archeology student living in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere in Moscow of the nineties (which includes a woman lover), decides to go on a interminable train trip to Murmansk, the northernmost Russian port, to look for 10,000 year old petroglyphs. Her lover cancels at the last minute (the affair, like the weather, growing cold), but she decides to follow up with the plan. Most of the movie describes the never-ending train trip with an accidental replacement for her lover, a young Russia worker going to Murmansk to work on a lucrative but dangerous mining project. He is uneducated, uncouth, often crude and repulsive, so the forced company makes her trip a misery. But with time (guess what) she discovers an introvert, sensitive, chivalrous man and (guess what) falls in love. The reasons for her lover cancelling the trip are vague, as the reasons for her continuing with their plan. The best I could guess was a young woman, really still a girl, trying to find her intellectual and sexual identity under the cover of academic pursuit. Alioha, her Compartment 6 roommate, is even more enigmatic. He is attracted to her, but also scared of the budding romance. All-in-all, a very slow lyrical trip into the snow-covered north in a prediluvian train to look for prediluvian rock art. The movie deserves really just six stars, but the acting and the sort-of-mystical camera earn it another one. Truth in advertising-the petroglyphs are in the area of Murmansk-on Kanozero island. They are "just" 3-4 millenia old (but in other sites there are some much much older). Having seen many much older and more enigmatic - I wouldn't have braved Russian trains, Russian cold, and Alioha to see them up close.
Review of Compartment Number 6
