Edited from countless home movies, Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend not only shows her best friend Kimi’s descent into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.
If the title didn’t tip you off, the opening scene will. How to Save a Dead Friend starts with a funeral. Kimi is dead. Best friend of director Marusya Syroechkovskaya. He wasn’t saved. Not literally, anyway. Is he metaphorically saved, immortalised in this documentary? One could see it that way, but frankly, that’s not how it feels. What is immortalised here is his slow, inexorable, seemingly unavoidable descent into drugged depression and death. How do you save a best friend? You don’t. Not here, not now, not in Russia in the 2010s.
For as intimate as How to Save a Dead Friend is, Syroechkovskaya makes clear from the start that this isn’t just a private story. The first words of her voice-over, immediately after the funeral, are: “Whenever anyone says Russia’s exclusively for Russians, I think: bullshit! Everyone knows Russia’s for the depressed.” She starts and ends her documentary with endless rows of apartment buildings. Leaving me with one overriding thought: this is where all the other Kimis live.
And Kimi is certainly not the first of their friends to die young, as Syroechkovskaya’s voice-over tells us: “Lyosha jumped off the roof. Ilya threw himself under a car. Natasha went by golden shot. The other Lyosha also OD’d, after he helped Natasha. Kirill hanged himself. Stas died in a car accident. Lena also OD’d. We definitely thought we might be next.”
Meanwhile, her camera zooms in on a mound of earth covered with what I think are gun shells, possibly drug cartridges, which fades into a zoom into space, stars shooting by. Just because you are talking about death, overdose and suicide, doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it. Syroechkovskaya enjoys playing around with her editing software, one moment creating a little retro slideshow, the next some musical interludes, put together mostly intuitively with a distinct punk-inspired sensibility.
She also has fun with Kimi. Almost the entire documentary is a flashback, a retrospective look at their relationship. The two visibly love each other – even if they don’t believe they have long to live. Kimi was the friend she needed when she herself was at her most vulnerable; Kimi, she says, and we can see it, gave her happiness. They go to concerts together; the film’s soundtrack is excellent. Punk, rock, and grunge, in English and Russian. They sit under a Kurt Cobain poster and joke about their suicidal tendencies. When they get a new cat, they call him Ian – after Ian Curtis, lead singer of one of the most depressing bands ever, Joy Division, who killed himself aged 23. “But cats don’t usually live that long, so we figured the chances of Ian repeating his namesake’s destiny were slim.”
It’s one of the biggest clichés about depressed people: that they sit around moping all day, immobile, gloomy. Depressed people can be cheerful, make jokes, have fun. At least part of the time. It’s just that, underneath, the gaping hole of meaninglessness is always there. As it is in this documentary.
Another cliché is that people who cut themselves want to kill themselves. Which also isn’t necessarily true. When Syroechkovskaya lists (she likes listing things) all the things she used to cut herself with (“a utility knife, sharp paper edges, manicure scissors, pins, plastic school rules, shards of my favourite [DVD] mixtapes, broken light bulbs, and fingernails when nothing else was available”), she doesn’t expound on her reasons. But when, later in the documentary, we see her being hoisted up by four hooks that were, in close-up, pushed through the skin on her back, it is clear: this self-mutilation isn’t self-destructive, it’s the opposite: it’s a way to feel. To feel something, anything. To feel alive. As this documentary does.
Syroechkovskaya’s other anchor, apart from her love for Kimi and her desire to feel, is her camera. It seems as if she’s always filming – at least, no one around her ever seems surprised that she is. Kimi envies her for it. At least she has her camera. At least she has a goal. And now that’s she’s editing this film, she has twelve years of home movies to choose from.
But although How to Save a Dead Friend was edited from home movies, this isn’t just another home documentary. For Syroechkovskaya, Kimi is the pinhole through which we see Russia, this “Depression Federation”, as she calls it. The years are marked by New Year’s Eves, as Yeltsin (who is stepping down), Medvedev (who is stepping in), or Putin (who has been leading Russia for almost all of Syroechkovskaya’s, and Kimi’s life) spout their soulless New Year’s wishes, while friends and family sit in front of the TV drinking, muttering “screw you” at the screen.
Documentaries are made at least three times: when they are shot, when they are edited and when they are seen. Kimi died in 2016, but we are seeing this in 2022. It is unavoidable that Putin’s TV appearances and people’s reactions to him are experienced differently while the war in Ukraine is still raging. And when Kimi’s older brother jokes, “I’ll find me a girl with braids and a car with a good stereo and go to Crimea or Abkhazia”, he’s probably just thinking of the beaches, but it inevitably carries echoes of war.
For Syroechkovskaya, however, Putin seems to be just another unavoidable TV image. Or, vicariously, a heavy police presence on the streets which she registers as a matter of fact. When she films Putin’s New Year’s speech, she zooms in until nothing remains of the nation’s leader but blurred, shapeless pixels.
Which, in the end, is also all what’s left of Kimi. “If there’s life after death, then it’s digital like this”, Syroechkovskaya sighs. “Where you remain pixelated for ever.” Her film makes me feel bad, sad and glad at the same time. Bad for her and her contemporaries. Sad, because of its overwhelmingly despondent atmosphere. But glad that she shared it with us, as it seems to tap into a specific kind of desperation these and, as far as I can tell, many other Russians are experiencing. And that, although depressing, is also supremely interesting and strangely feels very much alive. Alive with nihilism – as weird as it sounds, that’s how this documentary feels. Like an intense punk concert on the edge of the volcano at the end of time.
Sweden/Norway/France/Germany, 2022, 103 minutes
Director Marusya Syroechkovskaya
Production Docs Vostok, Sisyfos film
Producer Ksenia Gapchenko, Mario Adamson
International sales LightDox
Script Marusya Syroechkovskaya
Cinematography Marusya Syroechkovskaya, Kimi Morev
Editing Qutaiba Barhamji
Sound design Yngve Leidulv Sætre, Thomas Angell Endresen
Sound Gasan Hagverdiev, Ada Laub
Music Felix Mikensky
With Marusya Syroechkovskaya, Kimi Morev
