Poltory komnaty ili sentimentalnoe puteshestvie na rodinu (Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, 2009)

The Jewish Russian poet Joseph Brodsky ended up being more recognised by the world at large through his Nobel prize and his adopted home in the United States than by the Soviet Union that imprisoned him as being as 'social parasite' and then exiled him. A Room and a Half would have enough material in this alone for a hefty biopic, but goes one step further in appending a fictional account of his return to the land of his birth, a journey he never made and a layer that might have been redundant were it not for enabling the director to lend added poignancy and meaning to the use of his poetry in contextualising and driving the story. This is something that biopics of artists, frequently those of writers, fail to do, falling back on the presumption that its up to the audience to be familiar enough with the artist's work to allow the filmmaker to skip over the potentially awkward issue of how to elegantly fit in a wholly other medium into one that is primarily visual and  auditory. So, the writings are used to telling effect, but the film also makes bold use of a wide palette of styles, from mock archive footage all the way to animation, a method that could be obtrusive if handled gratuitously and instead enriches the experience further. It's an unassuming gem of a film.

8/10