Nigina Saifullayeva's ‘Fidelity’

A revolutionary Russian film smashes through sexual taboos from a woman's perspective

On June 13, Nigina Saifullayeva’s film Fidelity premiered at Russia’s annual Kinotavr film festival. The drama centers on a young woman named Lena who suspects her husband of cheating on her and decides to repay him in kind — again, and again, and again. Meduza’s resident film critic Anton Dolin explains why the film represents nothing less than a small revolution for Russian cinema and how it reveals that the struggle for free thought in Russia could actually rest on the freedom to feel.

Nigina Saifullayeva’s Fidelity is a small revolution. It is a revolution because such a degree of openness and sensitivity has never been seen before in Russian film. It is a small revolution because, judging by the audience’s awkward reactions during the premiere (giggles, coughing, fidgeting, and the literal hiding of eyes behind hands), the film’s distribution will be narrow and viewers’ reactions restrained. Many of the adults in the audience seemed to have fallen back into childhood and walked in on their parents doing something illicit in the bedroom. And how did they react? They closed the door and ran back to their toys in the hope that they could forget what they had seen.

The film’s protagonist is a successful OB-GYN named Lena who notices that her husband, a theater actor named Seryozha, seems to be texting one of his castmates suspiciously often and going out inexplicably much. The couple has long had trouble with their sex life, and Lena immediately makes her move. If he’s cheating, she will too, and she’ll start with the first guy she meets on the beach (the film takes place in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea). Then, she moves on to a second guy, and a third, and so on — she finds it hard to stop even when she finds new evidence that Seryozha likely hasn’t done anything wrong. Their marriage veers toward collapse, as does Lena’s career, but she has discovered something in herself that has been repressed for too long, and she just can’t hit the brakes.

Yevgenia Gromova, who was known until now primarily as a TV and theater actress, creates something onscreen that is as-yet-unseen in all senses of the word. Most everyone, or a definite majority of the population at the very least, does exactly what she does in their own beds. However, Russian filmmakers of years past could only dream of the level of freedom, unsparingness, unselfconsciousness, and, most importantly, sincerity of feeling that permeates every erotic scene in this film (the best of which, by the way, is with the husband). Every single possible taboo is present here. At the same time, there is no trace of pornographic mechanics at work. This film is exclusively about human emotional life and not about sexual technique — in fact, good technique escapes its characters at times in ways that are both touching and persuasive. Here, erotica is certainly a prominent (and consistently powerful) device, but it is not at all an end in itself. Fidelity is, before all else, a psychological drama.

It is particularly important that the foundation of the film is a female gaze on sex. That gaze belongs to director Nigina Saifullayeva and her co-screenwriter Lyubov Mulmenko (One More Year, The Nadezhda Combine), and the marvelously talented camera operator Mark Ziselson brings it to life (Saifullayeva discovered Ziselson in her full-length debut, Name Me). All the film’s men, from the loving but careless Seryozha (Alexander Pal) onward, are followers rather than leaders, and the viewer is not with them. The viewer, regardless of gender, is with Lena, whose head is spinning with the rediscovery of her own body.

The film swings like a pendulum between an urge to play at integrity and a desire for the forbidden, between repression and shamelessness. Even the film’s name, which is a clever antonym to its central plot device and an anagram for “jealousy” in Russian, speaks to that fluctuation. In this sense, Fidelity is a very Russian film whose roots reach back to Dostoyevsky’s sinful, unpredictable heroines and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina while drawing simultaneously on memorable European dramatists like Clouzot, Malle, Chéreau, and particularly Bergman, a virtuoso of this subject matter. The fact that the action of the film is set in the coastal borderland of Kaliningrad is no coincidence. It’s curious that even if you start digging on a global scale, there are very few films to be found that describe a woman’s infidelity from a woman’s point of view (but one of the best is Jane Campion’s The Piano, which earned her the only Palme d’Or yet awarded to a female director).

Fidelity blames no one and justifies no one. It neither stigmatizes nor glorifies. There is no place here for either moralism or amorality, but the film also cannot be called an anthropological investigation of spousal betrayal. Its creators observe with sympathy and surprise the way many of us unwittingly live lives that are not our own until some happy or unhappy stroke of chance allows us to look in the mirror as though for the very first time. Speaking of which, the film is full of reflections much like Bergman’s or Lynch’s or Kubrick’s or those of many other honest, sensitive artists.

While most of Russian cinema continues to pursue its trademark back-and-forth with sociopolitical reality, whether by running away from it or fruitlessly tossing a lasso in its direction, Saifullayeva has come out with a gratingly radical thesis: the only reality deserving of our attention is our own feelings, and the only freedom worth laying down our heads for is the freedom to express them. It may well be that the Russian language has no words for that thesis, that we’re living in a narrow trench of intergenerational trauma, that we were raised by a country where there was no sex and the authorities kept a tight grip on the right to make sexual advances (oh, how great is the Russian tradition of BDSM dramas featuring violent doms in uniform, from Cargo 200 to A Portrait at Dusk). It may well be that our complexes — and not just our rocket complexes — are a point of pride for many among us, but this drama about Lena and Seryozha in a small border town by the sea says loud and clear that Russia will be free.

Review by Anton Dolin

Translation by Hilah Kohen