The Fire Within: Exploring Revenge, Resilience, and Rebirth in “A Stoker” (2010). Film Review.
Some time ago, after the first viewing, the meaning of A Stoker was tightly intertwined with the idea of revenge of a little man (Russian literary concept). In a very general sense, I was not mistaken then, but still, after a second viewing, many more observations were born.
A Stoker is a Russian drama film directed by Alexei Balabanov. The movie is set in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, a period of post-Soviet anarchy and economic hardship. The main character, Ivan Matveyevich Skorobeinikov, a former Afghan veteran and writer, now works as a stoker at a factory. In his small boiler room, he burns coal and also helps his acquaintances dispose of the bodies of their enemies by burning them in the furnace. Ivan, who has lost his illusions and connections with the outside world, is completely immersed in his thoughts and memories.
The events of the movie reveal the indifference and cruelty of the surrounding world, while in parallel showing Ivan’s inner world through his writing. When Ivan discovers that one of the victims is his daughter, his life changes radically.
The basis of the newly realized idea for me was the idea of the man-made nature of life, directly expressed in the writing of the book about Khailakh by the protagonist. The final work, rambling and abruptly cut short at the end, is nothing less than a reflection of the life of its author, a concussed Afghanistan war veteran thrown into the background of the realities of the 90s.
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Discarded and of no value whatsoever, exactly like his jacket hung with tinkling medals, stored somewhere in the depths of his closet. No awards, no regalia, no heroics mean nothing in this new world anymore. Neither the past, wiped by contusions, nor the future, for the construction of which there is no strength. But what remains is a fire, contained by the walls of the stoker’s furnace and at the same time sustained from the outside, which we can interpret as human anger, characteristic of the many lost in those/these/any hard times.
It’s funny, but I was just thinking that never Balabanov’s movies have ever brought me to tears. It’s even surprising, because he really knew how to reflect all the hopelessness of a man at the break of epochs. But probably the point is that the world created by Balabanov often looks like an emotionless statement of facts: the strong become stronger, the weak become weaker, and both have nothing to do but envy, take revenge and die. To die quickly, ridiculously, without even a squeak.
Envy and the constant search for self-interest in general seem to be the driving force, the main motivation of all the characters in the movie. All except the stoker himself, trying to piece by piece to assemble and realize his life and his place in the new country after the war, but eventually admitting: “War is different. There are ours and our enemies. And here — all ours”, underneath which, however, the opposite is very easy to read: “And here — all are enemies”.
