Exile Exotic

Some pilgrimages are so astonishing that people make them without moving, sitting round a swimming pool. Exile Exotic is a case in point. While its operatic, haunting siren songs evoke some far-off odyssey, Sasha Litvintseva, a Russian exile, gives a voice-over account of a conversation with her mother in front of a luxurious architectural replica of the Kremlin. “I was born the year that History was supposed to end. But it repeats itself.” Picking up on the common date, 2004, which saw the construction of this Turkish hotel and the beginning of her exile, the filmmaker links the two “exes” of exile and exotic. The example of a Russian cathedral razed to the ground by the Soviets, then rebuilt identically leaving no trace of its disappearance, strikes the imagination as an emblem of a glossy revamping akin to revisionism. Visually, water is used to convey these misleading reflections, but these surface effects are never superficial, and instead touch on the harmful repression of a tragic past. This “replica” or duplication seems to remind us that history repeats itself on a miniature scale. Seeing again without seeing again, returning without returning, talking with her mother without making herself understood… all evidence the impossibility of belonging to one side or the other, to the home country or to the tawdry “holiday resort” that has taken its place. (Charlotte Garson)