Navalny Review

He looks up for a moment, distracted by the interview he’s undergoing, by the part he plays as an indefatigable champion against the tyranny of Putin’s regime. A moment that he explains some time later, but there is no need, in which he realizes that what he says could be used after his death, creating a “boring homage film”. But Navalny wants the documentary that bears his name, directed by Daniel Roherto whose team he has granted total irruption into his daily life, either un thriller. A moment of humanity, a crack of fragility in the character he has been forced to live, as well as play, for years: the best-known dissident in all of Russia. With his contradictions, such as his past relations with the far right, but, as he says, in such an emergency moment for Russian democracy he could not be too selective in his travel companions.

In early 2020, Roher set out on a journey to a small town in the Austrian Black Forest, a stone’s throw from the German border, where Alexei Navalny he’s getting back into shape – like a new Wolverine – after being poisoned and not killed for so much, who was put in a coma on a flight back to Moscow after a stop in Siberia in his campaign to become president of Russia. Indeed, it was this his unforgivable sin for the tsar: being a real opponent, a candidate of substance and not a puppet put there by the ruling United Russia party to offer a simulacrum of democratic competition.

Precisely what happened on 24 February 2022, with the war unleashed against (all of) Ukraine, gives us a Putin who has surpassed on the right the one still attentive to the international reaction and local public opinion which is shown in this terrific documentary. After all, a handful of months have passed since the film ended (mid 2021), with Navalny’s return to his homeland and his arrest, with the subsequent useless hunger strike and constant rebound between unlivable solitary confinement cells and moments of respite. Nevertheless the world has changed, and Roher reconstructs with an enthralling rhythm and the privilege of point of view fly ot the wall (by us we could translate with ‘peeking like a fly on the wall’) the end of any opposition to Putin’s follies. A breaking of all internal inhibitions that accompanied his subsequent flight forward also in international politics.

A year focused above all on storytelling the poisoning investigation, complete with names and surnames of the culprits and evidence of how the directive came directly from the Kremlincarried out by Navalny’s foundation, supported by a noble and curious character, a kind of rich Bulgarian benefactor passionate about online and offline investigations. In the heart, exactly two-thirds into the documentary, one of the most shocking scenes seen this season. Pure cinema, made up of gazes but without the luxury of verisimilitude but rather that of an incredible reality. A phone call with those who participated in the poisoning attempt, which in Hollywood would have been considered unreliable. But we don’t want to spoil the surprise, even if you know the details of the evidence that Navalny has bounced (as always) on social media, as being “here and now”, live and without filters while stupidity is laid bare of the regime and its useful idiots is in any case jaw-dropping.

One can choose to react almost by laughing and placing a hand on his temple, as done by a witness present, or by remaining motionless and with tears in his eyes, as Navalny’s assistant reacts. What is impossible is to keep the Great Dissident’s composure on the edge of irony, while he thrusts the knife of truth into the soft underbelly of the contradictions of a tyranny that mockingly – history teaches us – can only become more and more ridiculous, even if it provokes increasingly tragic effects.