The Target is the third project by REN Film and its founder Dmitry Lesnevsky, after Andrey Zvjagintzev's The Return (the Golden Lion and the Lion of the Future at the 60th Venice Film Festival in 2003) and The Banishment (Golden Palm for Best Actor at the 60th Cannes Film Festival in 2006).

The film is based on the original script by Vladimir Sorokin & Alexander Zeldovich. It is a story of the time that cannot be stopped. Any attempts to do it will bring anguish to body and mind, because humans are beings living in time. The makers have brought yet another idea into the film: it is also a story of a sudden and merciless collision with something transhuman, something that may be called God.

Dmitry Lesnevsky, the producer, was attracted to this work firstly because he appreciated Sorokin’s great irony at the world of triumphant “stability”, where no one can hide behind a mask from agonizing questions of sense, spirit and existence just the same. That was the feeling that inspired the work over the picture and made the authors change and rearrange it all along.

The conception of the film arose in December 2005, but the shooting started only in April 2007. Casting of the leading characters took up almost a year. Director looked for “the faces of the film” all over the world and finally formed an international teem of main actors.

CAST

Maxim Sukhanov - Viktor

Justine Waddell - Zoya

Vitaliy Kischhenko - Nikolay

Danila Kozlovsky - Mitya

Daniela Stoyanovich - Anna

CREW

Director: Alexander Zeldovich

Screenwriter: Vladimir Sorokin, Alexander Zeldovich

Producer: Dmitri Lesnevsky

Cinematography: Alexandre Ilkhovski

Music: Leonid Desyatnikov

TECHNICAL DETAILS:

Format: 35 mm, color, cinemascope 1:2.39, 25 fps
Length: 154 minutes, 4 482 m
Language: Russian, English subtitles
Country: Russia
Production year: 2010

SHORT SYNOPSIS

The year is 2020, all over Russia stability and prosperity triumph, following a decade where an official ideal social structure has been both established and celebrated.

The heroes of this film belong to Russia’s elite. They appear prosperous, influential, and happy - privately they feel themselves to be losing youthful energy and passion. Determined to reverse this process, they travel to the Altai Mountains in search of an abandoned secret astrophysical facility where cosmic radiation was studied by the Soviets. The local people refer to this facility as “The Target”. It is rumored that any person who spends time in its centre experiences the return of youth and rejuvenated sharpness of perception, desire and ambition.

Indeed on their return to Moscow, the heroes feel themselves renewed and absolutely happy. However, ‘The Target’ sharpens all aspects of character: and so accompanying their feelings of infinite freedom and power are other less comfortable sharpened character traits. They begin to lose control of their lives. Each character is forced into battle with their own rebellious ego.

SYNOPSIS

Russia, 2020: The country thrives; its mineral recourses are, as ever, in plentiful supply. A superhighway “Guangzhou - Paris” cuts across Russian territory, connecting producers and consumers. Russia builds its wealth from the transit revenues.

Stability prevails. A unique social structure has been found, combining native Russian traditions and international trends. It is called “ecological democracy”. Its founding principle is that each person occupies a specific niche in the social ecosystem in accordance with an official rating procedure and does not try to lay claim to others.

The heroes of the film belong to Russia’s elite. Viktor is the Minister of Natural Resources, Zoya his wife, her brother, Mitya, a national TV celebrity, and Nikolay is a Lieutenant Colonel in a mobile customs unit working on the “Guangzhou - Paris” highway.

They have everything money can buy. The only things they lack are youth and happiness. However, they think they can “buy” these back. They know that somewhere in the Altai Mountains, near the Mongolian border, lies an abandoned Soviet secret facility - an astrophysical complex resembling a giant dish – “The Target” - where the Soviets studied cosmic radiation. Any person who spends time in the centre of this dish returns to their normal life rejuvenated: their bodies regenerate; they feel themselves again, young, vigorous and fresh.

And so the heroes travel to Altai. There, in a small mountain village near the astrophysical complex they meet Anna, hostess of a Radio program “Chinese for Dummies”, and Taya, a local girl, who has been living in the village for many years. Taya is fifty-two but she looks twenty-five.

Together, with Anna and Taya, they return to Moscow. The rumored effects of “The Target” turn out to be true: their youth returns, each day they feel better and better. However the growth of negative aspects of their personalities accelerate too.

They lose control of themselves. Their lives speed up exponentially, and none is equipped to face their true nature. Dormant anxieties stir and they ask themselves if they still know what the purpose of their lives are? They begin to doubt if they are still capable of telling good from bad. Driven with these uncontrollable emotions, some of our heroes met a tragic end, others find a way to preserve their identities and survive.

DIRECTOR’S AND SCREENWRITER’S NOTES

This is a film about humanity in the twenty-first century, about the limits of being “human, all too human” in the new global space. Russia, the distorting mirror of Europe, is its subconscious. Russia, a country of the grotesque and constant human experiment, always faces an agonizing question: ‘What is man, where are his limits?’

The axis of the world has shifted before our eyes. Russia is the only European country that borders China. It is a transit country – economically and culturally – lying between the old and the new world centre. In the film, in the year 2020, a superhighway “Guangzhou - Paris” cuts across Russian territory, connecting China and Europe - producers and consumers.

The heroes of the film belong to Russia’s future elite. They know that somewhere in the Altai Mountains, near the Mongolian border, lies an abandoned Soviet secret facility - an astrophysical complex that resembles a giant dish – “The Target”, where the Soviets studied cosmic radiation. It is rumored that any person who spends time in the centre of this dish ceases to age. The characters of our film spend a night there and stop ageing. But at the same time they start to change in an unpredictable way. Their lives turn into illustrations of the questions to which they have no answer. Are they happy?

A society of consumers exists not to consume the necessary but in order to be happy. One may recall Bataille: happiness and eternal youth are the super-products and super-goals of consumerism. Eternal youth is a consumer good – but what is the ethical price of this commodity?

Dostoyevsky said, “Russia is a lesson to the world.” It has lived through the collapse of Soviet ideology, which, in turn has spawned disbelief in the possibility of ideology at all. A gaping void of meaning has formed within the country, a void much more obvious than in the West, which survived the last century without a similarly ruptures. However this void of meaning is not purely Russian. It exists outside of Russia, though in Europe it is smoothed over by the continuous flow of history.

Alexander Zeldovich
Vladimir Sorokin