LE MONDE’S OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Movie year opens with a “morning-after the-night-before” movie that never seeks to seduce but rather seizes us in its fantastical, flocculent atmosphere. Quiet Life is the fifth feature film by the Greek director Alexandros Avranas and plunges straight into the daily life of a Russian refugee family. In 2018, after fleeing their country, Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova), Sergei (Grigoriy Dobrygin), and their two daughters crossed into Sweden and are living in temporary accommodation in Stockholm. The parents have applied for asylum and have done everything they can to integrate. Their children are in school, and the younger one excels in the school choir.
The movie opens showing two little girls with blonde hair and wearing dresses, shoes, and socks standing to attention at the front door of their apartment, as two agents from Sweden’s migration agency arrive to inspect their home. The visit is a silent, burlesque choreography that culminates in the kitchen when Natalia simultaneously lifts the lids of two casseroles, in which a meal is simmering. As if staging her new role as housewife, the Russian star Chulpan Khamatova – Good Bye Lenin! (2003), by Wolfgang Becker and Petrov Fever (2021), by Kirill Serebrennikov – now exiled in Latvia, admirably plays the suppressed anxiety of the movie’s character, who is as pale and gray-beige as her setting.
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