Engaging Post-Soviet Twist on Suspense in ‘Deceased’

With the elegant and tantalizing “A Friend of the Deceased,” director Viatcheslav Krichtofovitch and writer Andrei Kourkov take an old plot--hiring someone to kill you, only to change your mind--and use it to reveal the desperation and corruption that grips post-Soviet Ukraine, reducing the value of human life itself.

Yet when a man remarks that friendship, now replaced with purely business relationships, is part of “the glorious Soviet past,” this reference to the former USSR is expressed with bitter irony. “A Friend of the Deceased” is not nostalgic for Communist Party rule but rather for the warmth between human beings that is in danger of evaporating in a Darwinian struggle to survive in the new market economy.

You would think that Alexandre Lazarev’s Anatoli, a former academic fluent in English and French, would have plenty of opportunities to prosper in the new world of capitalist expansion. That the reverse is the case leaves us to suspect that men and women like Anatoli must be a dime a dozen in the former Soviet nations.

In any event, Anatoli slips into such drunken despair in trying to survive as a translator (mainly for crass new entrepreneurs) that he succumbs to a friend’s urging that he hire a hit man to rub out the more prosperous man to whom Anatoli has lost his ambitious wife.

He’s not serious about having his rival executed but instead decides to shift the hit man’s target to himself. After a rendezvous with a contract killer aborts when their meeting place, a cafe, closes early, Anatoli is surprised to realize that he’s glad to have a new lease on life, only to discover that his execution is set in motion and it that it’s too late to reverse it.

“A Friend of the Deceased,” which was selected for Cannes’ prestigious Directors Fortnight last year, is an anti-thriller in the sense that its makers transform its inherent suspense elements into an evocation of the paranoia that permeates Ukrainian society. Anatoli emerges as an engaging man, adrift in a world he may not be strong enough either to negotiate or to resist succumbing to its corruptions. The film’s other characters are similarly well-drawn.

Visually, “A Friend” is a jewel, with cinematographer Vilen Kolouta capturing three distinct areas of Kiev--the charming cobblestoned old city where Anatoli lives in a flat of faded elegance, the sleek night-life district and a suburban high-rise community under construction, at once impersonal and luxurious--that are virtually interchangeable with such developments the world over. Krichtofovitch fulfills his stated intention beautifully, which is to show “the inability of an intelligent, refined, cultured but weak man to find his place in the new society. . . . We can’t ask people to behave like heroes.”

* MPAA rating: R, for some nudity and language. Times guidelines: In addition to some moments of nudity and some strong language, the film has some violence plus complex style and themes.

‘A Friend of the Deceased’

Alexandre Lazarev: Anatoli

Tatiana Krivitskaia: Lena/Vika, the prostitute

Evgueni Pachin: Dima, Anatoli’s friend

Constantin Kostychin: Kostia, the contract killer

A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Franco-Ukraine co-production: Compagnie Des Films and Compagnie Est-Ouest/Studio National Dovzhenko and Studios du Kazakhstan Aimanova. Director Viatcheslav Krichtofovitch. Producers Nikola Machenko, Pierre Rival. Executive producer Jacky Quaknine. Screenplay by Andrei Kourkov. Cinematographer Vilen Kolouta. Editor Elvira Soumovskaia. Costumes Lioudmila Serdinova. Music Vladimir Gronski. Production designer Roman Adamovitch. In Russian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Westside Pavilion, 10800 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 475-0202; the State, 770 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 792-3540; and starting May 22 at the Port, 2905 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Corona del Mar, (714) 673-6260.