Venice film festival: The director’s bleak epic project about the scientist Lev Landau finally focuses on the genius maudit who inspired the series
How would it be if Christopher Nolan got sidetracked while making Oppenheimer, and decided to spend 20 years and millions of dollars of other people’s money reconstructing the Los Alamos HQ in all its minute detail, which would be the site of a gigantic immersive multimedia project, releasing epic and sexually explicit sidebar movies about … someone who worked in the commissary … or a scary incidental guy from the CIA … before finally getting round to the fundamental main-event movie with Cillian Murphy as the A-bomb’s father?
Perhaps it would be something like Ilya Krzhanovsky’s authentically mad, obsessively sexual, and spectacularly pessimistic epic project about the Soviet scientist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, or “Dau”, whose work spanned the 1920s to the postwar and cold war eras, and whose notional endorsement of free love the DAU movies escalate into a dissolute sex addiction. Khrzhanovsky gives this a kind of classical Hellenic distinction by fictionalising a Greek background for our mysterious horny hero, whose indulgences coexist with his self-questioning obsession with his own genius and loneliness. It would be vulgar and irrelevant to wonder if Khrzhanovsky, like any artist, is in fact working on a self-portrait. But you surely can’t work on a (still unfinished) project like this without a strong personal connection.
Here, at all events, is the latest Dau iteration, a more conventionally conceived biopic about Lev Landau (although we don’t see him getting the Nobel – perhaps that’s a separate film). Apparently this is the feature that Khrzhanovsky originally envisioned before the creative Big Bang that created the Dau multimedia universe. His first offshoot picture DAU. Natasha (2020) was about two women who work in the canteen of Dau’s research institute, a place drenched in sexual tension and political paranoia and violence. The next film to come was the grisly epic DAU. Degeneration (2020), set in the late 60s with Dau himself – still here a peripheral character – on his deathbed.