Film: Ward No. 6
Year of production: 2009
UK Release date: 11th July 2011
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Certificate: 15
Running time: 83 mins
Director: Aleksandr Gornovsky & Karen Shakhnazarov
Starring: Vladimir Ilin, Aleksey Vertkov, Aleksandr Pankratov-Chyornyy, Evgeniy Stychkin, Viktor Solovyov
Genre: Drama
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Russia
Language: Russian
Review by: Bill Sherwood
Ward No. 6, an adaptation of Chekhov’s 1892 short story of the same name, is brought up to date in this modern treatment of a tale of the doctors and patients inhabiting the rooms and corridors of a Russian psychiatric hospital.
The film begins with several inmates of a psychiatric ward being interviewed. They briefly recount their childhoods as possible reasons for their current circumstances and discuss their dreams and aspirations. Some want marriage and families, where others simply want to get out.
The audience is taken back over 400 hundred years and given a potted history of the asylum’s gradual transformation from a wooden chapel dedicated to St Nicholas, then a stone monastery, a hospital for sufferers of TB, and finally, its present incarnation as a large psychiatric institution that ward no. 6 is a part of.
The previous senior psychiatrist, Dr Ragin, is now a mute inmate himself and the focus of the story. Through his predecessor, it is learned that Ragin wanted to study theology in his youth and was never inclined toward medicine, but his father had forced him toward it.
Given his innate philosophical bent, Ragin cannot help befriending the patient Ivan Gromov, a man he considers to be the one interesting conversationalist in the entire town. Ivan’s own philosophic musings make Ragin question his thoughts on existence for the very first time and having his world view turned upside down, his life changes its course in a manner he could never have expected…
The first thing an audience will notice about Ward No. 6 is its curious combination of supposed reality and fiction. The men interviewed at the beginning of the film are all real inmates of psychiatric institutions and are giving real answers. They are also peppered throughout the film and sometimes performing scripted roles. The documentary style is maintained through scripted interviews where actors play the main parts, but anything about Ragin’s back-story, which is beyond the scope of the ‘documentary’ time frame, is played as a drama where the camera is the traditional fourth wall.
At first, the transition of styles does not feel smooth to the viewer, or even necessary. Dr Khobotov, the present senior psychiatrist, and Ivan are not badly acted at all, but when they are presented as interviewees amongst the real patients they stick out as fictional entities and consequently make the scenes far less believable. It is, however, an interesting method of marking the past, when Ragin was in charge of the patients and his own mind, against his present circumstances. For the dramatic sequences in the past, the audience is a passive viewer taking in the story, but in the present, the viewer is like a doctor studying Ragin as he is now a part of the system.
Updating Chekhov’s narrative to modern Russia and into a fictional documentary has some other awkward and occasionally humorous moments. Here and there characters talking directly to the camera offer personal information that in a story would be imparted through the narrative, not their own mouths. One result of this is that Dr Khobotov frankly admits that he wanted Ragin’s job when he first started working at the hospital. Another is when Ragin’s predecessor lists all the things that were wrong with the hospital under his supervision. That is, Ragin put a stop to his predecessor’s clandestine selling of surgical spirits, the harem of nurses and female patients that he’d set up, and the vermin. Apart from creating some black humour, all this really manages to do is reference the fact that it is a literary adaptation without explaining why.
At the core of this film are the conversations between Ragin and Ivan, and the effect they have on the doctor. His philosophy is partly fatalistic and he enjoys citing the life of Diogenes, a Greek founder of Cynicism. Although these talks are important in terms of the story, they do not take up much screen time. This is a good thing because they tend to come across as dialectics about the absurdities of societal institutions that might have been better in a lecture hall, or more tellingly, a book.
Throughout the film, the viewer is constantly being posed questions about insanity, whether in the individual or society itself, the methods of defining it and the treatment. Early on, Dr Khobotov explains that the line between sanity and insanity is illusory. Although this is a fairly obvious statement, it is not at all comforting, as it casts doubt on the process by which people are committed to psychiatric institutions. When Ivan persuades Ragin that it was not by chance that he had been committed and not fair either, the viewer feels sympathy for the fact that society trapped him. However, niggling in the back of one’s mind is that he has a certified persecution mania. The diagnosis itself is the trap because despite feeling that Ivan is right, the audience can never agree 100 per cent, which is a teasingly satisfying dilemma.
As this is the film’s main point, it is a slightly laborious one. Its running time is not long, but it feels it could be shorter. Late in the story, Ragin sums the message up to his friend, Mikhail, saying that once a human is declared mad they should give in because nothing can save them from their fate. Parts of the film feel like an unnecessary embellishment of this statement, delivered after the audience figure out the message for themselves. Alternatively, by leaving out his speech, this might not have been the case.
A well acted and thoughtful film, Ward No. 6 nevertheless feels like it has bitten off more than it can chew. Its mixture of styles manages to keep the viewer interested, but in the end is more of a gimmick that is obviously there to distance itself from its literary source. It never really decides whether to let the audience think for themselves or to tell them what is what, but it impresses the most in that it has at least tried to present its troubling themes in a unique way.
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