Some absences do not deceive, including that of the cell phone. Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen frees us from it in Compartment Number 6, dilapidated phone booths enthroned in the middle of the landscape, nothing abnormal. Laura (Seidi Haarla) sometimes looks for them like a castaway in front of a buoy, the only link that connects her to Moscow as she begins a journey of a few days by train towards the Arctic Circle. Driven by curiosity, the young Finnish archeology student dreams of seeing with her own eyes the petroglyphs that are the pride of Murmansk, drawings carved in stone and anchored since prehistoric times.
The getaway was going to be marvelous since Laura was to undertake it with Irina (Dinara Drukarova), her teacher, but above all her lover, who is clearly not having her first temporary affair with one of her students. But Laura will have to decide to go solo, which means sharing a sleeping car with Ljola (Yuriv Borisov), a Russian miner also on his way to Murmansk, barely recovered from the fall of the Soviet empire, judging by his face. . Faced with the advanced dilapidation of the train and a few artefacts from an era that seems distant to us today (a walkman, a camcorder, an explicit reference to titanicby James Cameron), everything points to the end of the 1990s.
Ljola’s open hostility towards Laura leads the latter to avoid her as much as possible, to beg one of the train employees to help her change cabins, and to attempt a return to Moscow in desperation. . None of this works, but this coming and going, these prolonged stops at the station and less and less acrimonious exchanges will bring these two lonely people together, despite the economic and cultural divides. Even the presence of a charming compatriot of Laura met by chance, too suave to be honest, will make her understand two or three things about what it costs to judge others too quickly.
Juho Kuosmanen embarks on the rails of a cinematographic genre in itself, the train often becoming this space on the margins of time where characters separated by everything gradually become inseparable, for the better (Before Sunriseby Richard Linklater) or worse (strangers we have train, by Alfred Hitchcock). Beyond the cold, the grayness and the dilapidated cars, Kuosmanen finely orchestrates less the start of a love affair than the (laborious) beginning of a fraternal relationship.
Laura ends up posing on Ljola, a rough-hewn young man less hypocritical than the motley fauna she left behind in Moscow, with a tender gaze. At first put off by her manners, still humiliated at having been fooled by a woman whose promises she believed, the surly traveler ends up both having a good heart against bad luck (these petroglyphs, she will stop at nothing to admire), while discovering that this trying journey will not be in vain. Even her encounter with Ljola’s mother, who lives in typically post-Soviet destitution, will be able to reconcile Laura with a certain form of feminine solidarity.
This crossing marked by melancholy, slowly splitting the icy immensity of Russia – at a time when this country really does not have good press… -, is nothing ordinary behind closed doors on rails. Because the tandem formed by Seidi Haarla and Yuriy Borisov deploys as much contagious energy as repressed tenderness in seeking to tame each other, between a sinister cabin… and a staff that is just as much. They form the heart and soul of this shadowy stroll, Juho Kuosmanen depicting with little artifice a time stripped of noisy and demanding technologies which forces these two passengers to take a train, yes, but first in their direction. themselves.