Diana Ringo has made the first feature film of 1984 in Russian, and she’s done it her way, with little in the way of exterior financial backing. It’s cheap and it’s cheerless, but that just adds to the dystopian gloom. George Orwell would probably approve.
He might not be quite so happy about Yevgeni Zamyatin’s name being on the credits as a co-writer. Zamyatin wrote We, a Russian dystopian classic from 1924, which Orwell clearly borrowed from, though he stridently rejected the suggestion. In fact he’d already chucked that rock at Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World was definitely lifted from Zamyatin, according to Orwell at least. Both men, at various points, would concede that maybe they’d had just a tiny peek at We, or used words to that effect.
Whatever, this is Ringo’s film and her addition to the writing is significant. She adds a kind of tawdry sexuality, a joky carnality to the progress of Winston Smith, now renamed D503, from drone mathematician to thwarted revolutionary attempting the overthrow of Big Brother, via a love affair – in Orwell it was Julia, here it’s I-330, an art department employee of the state played by Ringo herself.
This is a highly idiosyncratic film, only the second by Ringo, whose Quarantine from a couple of years ago marked her transition from musician to film-maker. She provides the score here, of chilly cathedral synths, complementing the soundscape of windy blasts and rushing sounds. She also performs a couple of Chopin piano pieces on screen, which is probably a bit of out-and-out exhibitionism. The burlesque dancing is probably more of the same, though Ringo has said she wanted to reveal the lighter side of Orwell, a writer whose comedic notes tended to be black ones.
Visually this is a strange beast. The fantastical exteriors are done on a computer and are thrift-store cheap in looks. The interiors are all bare concrete and floorboards, dungeon-like in their simplicity, with the actors offering performances of a similar stripped-back simplicity. There’s possibly a touch of Tarkovsky here.
Aleksandr Obmanov works this tiny register well as D503, shifting from disaffected worker doing mindless work to lover to fighter, his imagination fired up early on by a conversation with C340 (Aleksey Sharanin), a philologist in the Newspeak department whose job is to remove words from the language. The more restricted the linguistic choices, C340 explains, the more difficult it is to commit thoughtcrime.
There is quite a lot of this sort of thing – chat. Quite a lot of scenes where one person faces another and explains something to them, while Ringo’s camera looks on impassively. Ringo is clearly more interested in the ideas in 1984 than the action. That said, there’s the scenes set in Room 101, where nightmares become reality. Here Ringo summons chills in interrogation scenes relying on little more than a gurney, a scalpel and some latex gloves.
Bedroom sci-fi, then, though its otherworldliness, bare-bones approach and affectless characterisations do eventually build a hypnotic head of steam. It’s chilling, which is as it’s meant to be.
When Orwell wrote 1984, in 1948 (the title a rebuke to his own era), the future was far off and uncertain. Though Ringo’s film is set in a future of sorts, it’s also, obviously, set in the past of over 40 years ago. Either way, the passing of the years has left some of Orwell’s prognosticating high and dry. In Orwell’s view the poor suffering proles were going to have the freedom crushed out of them by an overweening state. Huxley had a different take – the proles would clamour for the surveillance state, not resist it. In that sense it’s one-nil to Huxley. Though in a world surveilled by Apple, Meta, Google, and so on, is the nation state really the enemy it once was? Ringo, by plastering the face of Big Brother all over everything – including takeaway coffee cups – seems to have that angle covered too.
1984 – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
