Boris Akopov’s feature debut “The Bull” announces in serious text at the outset that it is based on a true story. But the film unfolds along such formulaic lines, from its arc of …
Juri Borisov, Stasya Miloslavskaya, Sergei Dvoinikov, Alexander Samsonov, Alexander Levin Egor Kenzhametov, Maria Zvonareva, Afina Kondrashova, Mikhail Khuranov, Alexei Filiminov. ’s feature debut “The Bull” announces in serious text at the outset that it is based on a true story.
When we meet him, Anton aka “Bull” — a nickname/play on his surname that he got in prison — is ginning up his crew of buzz-cut, bovver-booted hoodlums, many of whom he’s known since childhood, for a clash with a rival gang. Akopov, along with DP Gleb Filatov, shoots excitingly, with a canny eye for the brute choreography of the groin kick and the clothesline-knockout, but the fight is complicated when his little sister Anya shows up.
The attraction really exists between Anton and Tania. Possibly because a love story requires less untranslatably hardboiled local gangster-speak, but more likely because Borisov and Miloslavskaya have natural chemistry, the film is surprisingly touching in their hesitant romance, that stutters as badly as Anton, yet actually contains the kernel of something true amid so much that feels like cliché.
Bad subs put reviewers in a quandary. On the one hand, it’s unfair to a promising first-time filmmaker, who clearly has the reins of genre firmly in hand and some pretty nifty ideas about dynamic shooting and editing , that his otherwise solidly built film should be penalized for something beyond his control. And considering “The Bull” took the top prize at Sochi’s
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