previously published on Cineuropa
The history of the Crimean Tatars is a long and complicated one, but the events of the 20th and 21st century, seen from the Crimean Tatar perspective, could only be described as tragic. The Tatars were affected by the Russian famine in the early 1920s and Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, only to be collectively accused of collaboration with the Nazi occupier and deported to Central Asia (mainly Uzbekistan) in the 1940s. Every attempt of protest and every effort to go back to the homeland was further punished, using the system of penal colonies in Siberia. The resistance did not completely die out, and some figures such as Mustafa Dzhemilev, nowadays a people’s deputy of the Ukrainian parliament, have kept the proverbial flame alive. He is the protagonist of Ivan Tymchenko’s historical thriller-drama Oxygen Station, which has premiered in competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
We first meet him as a boy (played by Danylo Bondarev) in a strange, stylised dream sequence involving a sinister-looking magician and a political conversation no child should get involved in. Later we realise that the adult Mustafa (Borys Orlov, who played Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in the 2019 biopic Taras: Homecoming) lives in the Zyryanka penal colony in Siberia, where he fills the oxygen tanks in a facility next to criminals and ex-convicts. Although he is a good worker who does not complain much, the prosecutor Shalandin (Viktor Poltoratskyi, the same actor who plays the magician in the dream sequences) is set on pinning him down for the murder of Lunin, a local news reporter and communist provocateur. Mustafa is still labelled and remembered as an enemy of the state, although his recent protests are only recorded in the form of letters and in a personal journal.
Back in Uzbekistan, Safinar (Khrystyna Deilyk, glimpsed in Roman Bondarchuk’s Volcano) is concerned that the national hero has stopped fighting for the cause, so she boards the train from Tashkent to Moscow, not realising that KGB agents are following her. What is her final destination? Does it have anything to do with the criminal plot and the investigation of it in Siberia? And what is the role of the mysterious man Hani (Edem Ibadullaev)?
The script written by Mykhailo Brynykh (who previously collaborated with the director on the 2019 title Beshoot) runs on two parallel tracks to show that free life in the USSR was not very different from life in the gulag. Up until the very end, those two plot lines are very different in style and nature, and very far apart story-wise, which puts tremendous pressure on Tymchenko to balance and blend them into a relatively smooth whole. The opening is rather stylish, and he shows an ability to control both plots individually (the one set in Siberia follows the genre guidelines of the crime and political thriller), but a slower pace in the second act seems inevitable. However, the jumps to dream and fantasy sequences are a good solution to that problem.
Tymchenko makes the best of the components at his disposal. The performances from the ensemble are overall convincing, although the luckier actors get the “meatier” characters. The cinematography by Thomas Stokowski uses murky colours to underline decadence and the futile efforts to cover it up, and the production and the costume design remain faithful to the Cold War period, while the music composed by Jun Miyake offers short bursts of extra tension. In the end, Oxygen Station works rather well as both an issue-driven historical drama and a political thriller.