‘Limonov: The Ballad’ Review: Ben Whishaw Stars in a Portrait of a Radical That Is All Swagger and No Game
variety.comJessica Kiang That the name Limonov is pronounced Lee-MWAH-nov is one of two main things that Kirill Serebrennikov‘s “Limonov: The Ballad” teaches us about Eduard Limonov, the Russian radical, poet, dissident, emigré, returnee, detainee, bête noire and cause célèbre who in 1993 co-founded the ultra-nationalist National Bolshevik Party.
The second is that, as imagined in this adaptation of Emmanuel Carrère’s 2015 fictionalized biography, for all the shifting identities and attitudes he assumed over the course of his controversial life, his persona as an aggravatingly self-aggrandizing solipsist never wavered.
A sharper film could have excavated his contradictions to illuminating effect — the rise of populist, crypto-fascist political movements and their self-ordained maverick leaders being a not-irrelevant phenomenon these days.
But Serebrennikov (“Leto,” “Petrov’s Flu”), in love with the posture of the rebel that Limonov adopted without being terribly interested in what, at any given moment, he claimed to be rebelling against, mistakes the trappings for the substance and seems to regard his salacious yet oddly sanitized biopic mostly as a delivery system for a rather dated aesthetic of DGAF cool.
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