Julia Loktev’s My
Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow exerts its mighty grip
partly through the director’s calculated form of intimate near-invisibility: the
film’s subjects occasionally address or question her as she holds the camera,
but for the most part she’s silent and unacknowledged even at moments of
extreme stress or sadness, her fortitude reflecting that of her subjects, a
group of mostly female television and podcast reporters observed in the run-up
to and then the initial days of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The film is five and a half hours long, its length allowing a visceral sense of
escalating fear and pessimism: an evening-long New Year’s Eve broadcast on
December 31, 2021 has one guest after another expressing variations on how
there’s not much to be positive about but they nevertheless hope for the best;
just a few months later, virtually everyone on the show is either already or
heading into exile. Loktev generates a visceral sense of sadness and frustration,
sometimes masked by dark humour or escapism (I lost count of how many times the
Harry Potter universe is referenced), using titles in measured but astute
fashion to provide foreshadowing or context, her shifting focus (the friend who’s
initially most prominent is out of the country on vacation when the invasion
happens, and ends up not coming back, entailing that others take centre stage
in the final stretch) reflecting the prevailing sense of utter unknowability, of
living in a country where one might summarily be declared a “foreign agent,” where
livelihoods and basic aspects of everyday infrastructure might suddenly be
snatched away, where one of the more poignantly vulnerable participants faces a
wretched choice between remaining in a country that’s imprisoned her fiancée for
over a year without bringing charges, or leaving in the undefined hope that she
can do more for him by maintaining her own freedom, even if it’s the precarious
freedom of the exile (to be explored further in Part 2).
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