English readers of Joseph Brodsky's Book of essays that won him the Nobel Prize(Less than One) will recognize the film's title as coming from an essay in the book: "A Room and a Half." It is both a real and a symbolic space to which the poet never returned. The Filmmaker's fantasy-plot, however, takes off by withholding one of the most famous of Brodsky's poetic line "To St. Basil's (Vasilievsky) Island I will come to die." For those familiar with these lines, their absence becomes a form of suspense - until the are spoken in the last scenes. The historical canvas of Brodsky's like unfolds against a stylistic montage from Shadow-silhouette cut-out of the prerevolutionary poetic-aristocratic world of Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, etc. to the use of this avant-garde art form in service of the October Revolution. The Stalin-era film is the orange-tinged film stock of that era; the animation of the crows in the snow seems lifted from master animators of the 1970s. As a biography the film make me think most of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror," which brings together the scraps of images, paintings, poetry in an attempt to find a new wholeness with stream-of-consciousness connections, seamlessly connecting documentary images of the real Brodsky and his friends (as in th scene shot in the Restaurant Russian Samovar" on 53rd St.), with imaginary meeting of parents and child in the afterlife.
