The more great cinematic masterpieces one sees from the past, the more impatient one becomes with the unimaginative compromises of the present. And so one might start dreaming of the perfect film one would like to see made today, with all the invention and flourish once available, but would not now be dared. In my case, it would be a mixture of silent movie, 50s melodrama, and deadpan Bunuellian surrealism. Astonishingly, this is precisely what OF FREAKS AND MEN offers. Ungrateful wretch that I am, I feel a little dissatisfied because it conforms so precisely to my high expectations, but then I remember what I could have been watching in my local multiplex instead, and rejoice.

Like TOM JONES, FREAKS' prologue is filmed in the style of a silent (without even music),as it gives what seems to be a back story, but is just as enigmatic as what follows. But although sound eventually returns, and its devices are crucial to the film's effect, the film, beautifully, retains the same aspects of pre-talkie cinema - the gorgeous sepia monochrome, with blanched actors' faces giving the impression that we are watching a group of dummies partaking in a wry Grand Guignol; the use of intertitles; the use of silent projection speeds, which heightens the actors' movements, making them more abrupt, more singularly removed from reality. The style, as in the silents, is largely static too, so that meaning resides in the remarkably rich compositions and editing, rather than fluidity of camera movements.

This 'staticness' (sic) is thoroughly appropriate to a film set largely indoors, featuring characters who are at first metaphorically and later literally imprisoned. The melodramatic use of framing, as developed by Ophuls, Sirk, Powell, Minnelli and Ray, is utilised here to make tangible this oppressive interiority, so that the Victorian bric-a-brac seems to overwhelm these characters, as they are framed, trapped, in doorways, mirrors, etc. This use of mirrors is audacious and playful, visualising the characters' fragmentation (between duty and desire; public and private; mind and body; bourgeois propriety and underground vice etc. - it is significant that these trapped figures eagerly absorb the products of photography, while the photographers themselves have perfect freedom of movement, can navigate all the realms of the city, including land and sea. It is when the pictures begin to move (cinema),and the photographers limit themselves to the bourgeois apartment, that entropy sets in); but also suggesting a fantastical, magical realm, one of transformation, abrupt and unexpected turns of events and intrusions.

This gives the film its dreamlike momentum, in which these stuffed mannequins act, not to realistic motivation, but to the promptings of desire, a dream logic; or are acted upon as such. The sieving of emotion, the bizarre, unexpected plot twists, and character actions, the turning of events that do not necessarily follow logically, all create this oneiric state, as does the setting, a huge wintry Russian city that seems to have no-one in it besides the main characters, a kind of Eastern ghost town.

The film's movement is circular and repetitive, beginning and ending with a man entering and leaving the city. Scenes are repeated. The film is very reminiscent of contemporary literature, the restrained Gothic of Robert Walser for example - the deadpan horror of the subject matter, the repeated motif of the labyrinth, all speak of an indefinable anguish.

FREAKS' content, a tale of power-shifts in terms of sexualised exploitation; of the bourgeois realm of power and influence being taken over by servants, murderers, sadists and pornographers; of the ruthless degradation of innocence and difference; of the betrayal of cinema, then in its infancy, and full of promise, as an instrument of exploitation, all seem to point to the upcoming Revolution and violent change of social order, which would use cinema as its key disseminator of the 'truth', but the actions of all the characters seem so unwilled and arbitrary, and the horrors are so jaw-droppingly funny as well as ghastly, that such a boring analogy would be diminishing, and deny the 'victims'' own complicit desire.

In this film of walls and ceilings, the scenes that seared my brain are those of a somnolent boat gliding on the river, or the sublime, suicidial ice surf at the close, or the enchanted, Cocteau-like courting of Anna and Putilov through the roof-tops of St. Petersburg, scenes dazzlingly saturated in milky magic.

A very odd and freaky film with freaky (not just physical freakiness but mental freakiness as well.. ) characters, yet unforgettable for its images. What are they? St Petersburg/Leningrad shots without a soul in sight except for the film's characters. The closing shot of Johann stepping on a sheet of ice as it carries him away to possibly drown as the ice is melting downstream. The director's interest in the evolution of cinematography from still photography (embodied in the odd character Putilov). The images of steam engines that constantly appear outside Lisa's apartment and eventually carries her away (not in a carriage but in the single engine itself). And the evil, toothy smile of Viktor Ivanovich. There is even a tram that works on roads with a steam engine (is that a historical fact or Balabanov's imagination at work?) And the entire film is shot in sepia and black. My first Balabanov film. The political commentary is well-couched in deceptive visual metaphors.

Very odd Russian film, with a modern, almost postmodern theme (concerning Siamese twins and pornography),but set in the early years of the twentieth century and shot in a faux-naive style that one might almost believe was that of films from this period, if one was not aware of what they were really like. There's much to enjoy: the beautiful sepia photography (of the Russian winter, and of eyeballs); great facial acting; the downright oddness of plot, scene composition characterisation and movement; the sudden discontinuities, and the semi-random, peculiarly worded captions. Hardly a movie in the traditional sense, but still a work of art.