Cinema has always held a fascination with train carriages as a point of chance encounters or romantic entanglements. The confines of a compartment afford so many opportunities for pressure-cooker connections; think of the fateful rendezvous between Guy and Bruno in Strangers on a Train or Celine and Jesse in Before Sunrise. There is another intriguing coupling that takes place when an archaeology student and a boozy migrant worker share a second-class sleeper cabin in Juho Kuosmanen’s charming and prize-winning film Compartment No. 6. This is a central premise that could very easily turn into a suspense thriller as bleak as the chill wind which is blasting against the windows, and the film initially teeters on this possibility before unfolding into an odd couple comedy-drama which arrives at something approaching a warm and rather wonderful love story (of sorts).
Kuosmanen’s film, which is loosely adapted from Rosa Liksom’s 2011 novel of the same name, functions similarly as a period piece, though shifts the setting from the Soviet Union in the 1980s to a pre-Putin Russia in the 1990s. We first meet Laura (Seidi Haarla) at a spirited farewell party; the Finnish student is about to venture on a trip to see the ancient petroglyphs in the arctic port of Murmansk. It is immediately clear that Laura has a preoccupation with the past but there are some other telling details that suggest she is less certain of her future. Laura is in a relationship with an older woman named Irina (Dinara Drukarova), who has decided not to come on the trip. There is a sense that something is amiss between them. Soon after, Laura is boarding a train (with a walkman and camcorder to signify that we are in the 90s) where she finds herself sharing a carriage with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), a young Russian who is traveling to work in a mine.
So far so meet-cute, but as first impressions go, it is not a particularly good one. Ljoha is the kind of passenger that would make you want to immediately switch carriages. He is loud and vulgar and unpredictable, prone to speaking in a slurred shower of expletives. while swigging from a vodka bottle and singing the praises of his homeland – ‘Russia is a great country. We beat the Nazis. The moon. We went there!” In another amusing exchange between the pair, Ljoha is confused why Laura, or indeed anyone, would venture to see thousand year-old rock paintings. Laura, unamused, tries to find alternative lodgings but she fails to bribe the taciturn train conductor.
On the surface there is very little to connect these two strangers who have impacted on each other’s lives like colliding comets. The beauty of the script, which is spiked with ribald humour and emotional insights, is the way it gently upends the character’s perceptions of each other (and in turn the audience’s perception) as we realise that they are both bitingly lonely, complicated people who are dislocated from their current lives and the choices that they have made. They are two vagrant souls who slowly begin to recognise similar fault lines in each other and the gradual development of their relationship from a place of brittle hostility to warmness feels both authentic and movingly tender.
There is also a wonderfully atmospheric and textural quality to the film which adds to the lived-in tactility. As the agile camerawork follows Laura through crumpled, dimly lit carriages, we can hear the rattle and thrum of the train shake beneath our feet. JP Passi’s cinematography, shot in naturalistic hues, also teases out the inherent cinematic qualities of the Russian landscape by giving us slender glimpses through carriage windows fogged with condensation and half light.
However, the real pleasure of Compartment No. 6 is its unsentimentality and its patient refusal to give us anything that amounts to traditional expectations of a meet-cute. Both Harlaa and Borisov are terrific in the central roles, giving warm and generous performances and committing to a story that favours slow burn character building and incidental moments over mechanical plotting. Once the film leaves the confines of the train, it does lose some of the insouciant, exuberant charm of the interior sequences but it ends on a quietly optimistic, albeit irresolute, note for these two characters who have drifted into each other’s orbits against the bitter odds.
