Compartment No. 6 review – inspired sort-of romance mostly stays on track

The train is one of cinema’s most powerful tools. If the tracks are a strip of film, the train runs across it as though moving through a projector. The locomotive, that engine of industry, of modernism, is the setting for Compartment No. 6, Juho Kuosmanen's sort-of romantic follow-up to arthouse sleeper hit The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki. A period piece set at the turn of the millennium, the director has chosen the perfect way to visually represent a transitional Russia.

With its post-Soviet embrace of individualist capitalism, Russia at the turn of the century is a wild west. Moscow student Laura (Seidi Haarla) is attracted to the bourgeois lifestyle of her literature lecturer girlfriend. But even in a new world where nothing is true and everything is possible, she can only go so far in modelling herself into the ideal of the intellectual.

This is how Laura ends up on a solo train journey to the remote wilderness of Murmansk, where she hopes to see the petroglyphs, a series of thousand-year-old rock drawings. Laura is Finnish, but not a tourist – something she has to continually explain to her travel companions. They wouldn't be blamed for thinking so: alone and perpetually armed with a camcorder, she sticks out like a sore thumb to every eye-rolling local.

Yet in her train carriage, Laura comes across a very different ideal of the emerging Russia. Vadim (Yuri Borisov), a bald, brutish miner, is already several vodkas deep. He immediately asks Laura if she is travelling alone in order to sell herself. His certainty as to the sanctity of Russian men (“We beat the Nazis!”) reveals the new nationalism: proud of strength, enamoured with hierarchies, hopelessly cynical. The same old, just repackaged.

As this odd couple are confined together, an interesting relationship forms. Not quite romantic, and never less than adversarial. Haarla and Borisov are both extraordinarily expressive actors, and when they share the screen they practically bounce off it with energy. Though the screenplay follows some familiar beats, there are enough unexpected punchlines to feel that this breathes fresh life into the “chance encounter” sub-genre of films like Before Sunset.

But in the final, drawn-out act, Kuosmanen takes the drama off the train, putting a definitive end to the various emotional strands. Though this section captures the desolate feeling of the Russian landscape, one can't help but feel that Laura and Vadim are taking a long and winding road to a foregone conclusion. This is one of the most entertaining films of the year, until suddenly it isn't. Kuosmanen’s sentimental instincts would make him a fine choice for any mainstream romantic comedy, and Compartment No. 6 is an undeniable crowd-pleaser. But the political metier it sets up begs for a more clear-headed interrogation.

Compartment No. 6 was screened at the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It is released in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema on 8 April.