The heftiest feature film to emerge so far from the 20-year multidisciplinary DAU project follows four decades in the life of a Greek-born physicist at odds with the Soviet state.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
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Venice Film Festival More than six years after Ilya Khrzhanovsky premiered “DAU. Natasha” and “DAU. Degeneration” at the Berlin Film Festival — right before the global COVID lockdown — to a politely muted reception and limited distributor interest, you might think the moment has passed for another missive from the DAU Cinematic Universe. Turns out, however, that you can’t keep a good immersive multidisciplinary art project dau. Or even a flawed and ethically questionable one: Allegations of physical and psychological abuse on the sprawling set of this years-long undertaking have surfaced prominently, but not enough to deter the Venice Film Festival from programming “Dau” — seemingly, as implied by the back-to-basics title, Khrzhanovsky’s attempt to extract a quintessential dramatic epic from untold reams of material — in its main competition.
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