“The only thing worse than rape,” filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa wrote in the press notes for his 2017 film A Gentle Creature (Krotkaya), “is a hell of infinitely repeated rapes.”
A Gentle Creature is a hell of infinitely repeated rapes for its protagonist, an unnamed woman played by Vasilina Makovsteva in present day Russia. Taking its name and inspiration from a Dostoyevsky novella, A Gentle Creature is as tediously grim as you’d expect. Makovsteva’s character lives a simple and solitary life in rural Russia until she’s told by the post office that the care package she sent to her husband in prison has been returned to sender. Worried by this, she travels to the town where the prison is located to get some answers. The following journey is an odyssey of bureaucratic humiliation as time after time she is subjected to abuse by authority figures: she is strip searched by a security officer while being verbally harassed and leered at by an imprisoned man, shut out from the prison, coerced into a game of strip poker, and repeatedly verbally and physically abused. At the end of an exhausting two and a half hours of humiliation, a sequence takes place which we’re led to believe happens in the woman’s head. Makovsteva’s character is escorted from the train station and taken to a fairytale cottage where she is forced – yet again – to strip in front of men and watch a bizarre council where previously seen characters stand in as different allegories of Russia, before being bundled into a van where men attack her from the shadows, rip her clothes off, and rape her. Suddenly, she wakes up and the sequence begins to repeat itself, with the woman being escorted from the train station in exactly the same way as before. The film ends, as Loznitsa himself described, with “a hell of infinitely repeated rapes”, suggesting that this “gentle creature” will be assaulted again and again in a vicious unbreakable cycle, long after the credits roll.
Despite the film’s grim realism, A Gentle Creature is supposed to be taken as an unambiguous metaphor: those who are most vulnerable, the “gentle creatures” of the film’s title, will be “raped” – some literally but most metaphorically – by the Russian state. A Gentle Creature’s protagonist is given no name, dehumanised to a symbol and made to be an everywoman: her repeated abuse is an allegory for Russia’s totalitarian rule. Loznitsa uses rape as extreme metaphor: the power dynamics of gendered violence stand in for the power dynamics of a nation’s politics. This is hardly a radical or recent analogy. From Tolstoy to Jean-Luc Godard to Ted Hughes, artists have used the figure of woman to represent “the motherland”. In Eugene Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), the woman at the centre of the frame – chest bare, French flag raised in one hand and a musket held in the other – embodies France as a nation. She’s a figurative, not a real, woman. The connection between women and nationhood derives from even older analogies between their bodies and the land. Over the course of Western history, women have been bound to nature in both literature and art via the fertility of their bodies. Londa Schiebinger describes this phenomenon in the introduction to her book Feminism and the Body (2000):
“The mind/body dualism that long underpinned Western culture made males the guardians of culture and the things of the mind, while it associated females with the frailties and contingencies of the mortal body. Females, subject to unruly, unpredictable hormones, and other forces, have been identified so closely with nature that nature itself is often called ‘Mother Nature.’”
Following this, an attack on a woman’s body is the perfect analogy for an attack on nature, land, and, therefore, a nation or the motherland. It’s not really the protagonist of A Gentle Creature who is raped but Russia, “raped” by corrupt leaders in power. This depiction of rape as a metaphor is glaringly problematic: it not only perpetuates the gendered cultural binary of male/mind versus female/body but also reduces rape to an artist’s tool, representation rather than action.
Film is a visual art form. When we watch a film, we interpret certain images specifically chosen by a filmmaker in order to construct story, narrative, and meaning. In A Gentle Creature, the rape scene takes place within a dream sequence within a fictional film that is presented as highly metaphorical. As we watch the protagonist being assaulted in the back of the van, we’re disassociated from the action on numerous levels, conscious that what we’re being shown is a metaphorical assault in the most extreme sense. Because of this disassociation, instead of being horrified by the display of sexual violence we know that we’re meant to interpret the assault as something else. We’re not meant to be concerned for the woman’s safety or aghast at the rape itself – instead we’re asked to be aghast about what the rape actually means, the assault of a totalitarian bureaucracy on the Russian state. Loznitsa lights the scene so that we can’t see the men who assault the woman and the focus is instead placed on her body as it is clawed and handled. When the woman struggles against her assailants, the camera lingers over her naked chest – a use of graphic nudity that is jarringly gratuitous for a scene that’s supposedly using rape as a metaphor for nationhood. It’s a nasty and excessive piece of voyeurism. The sequence ends with a hard cut to the woman waking up from the dream and this, too, is a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card on Loznitsa’s part. The idea that the rape scene is a dream scene shifts blame from the men assaulting the woman to the woman herself – how could she dream something so fucked up? A moment of violence is turned into either a metaphor for an assault on a nation or, if taken literally, a disturbing rape fantasy. Because the assault isn’t ‘real’, Loznitsa doesn’t need to resolve it, the audience doesn’t have to concern themselves with the violence, and the film can move on. There are no consequences for a metaphorical rape.
In the introduction to her book Rape in Art Cinema, Dominique Russell points out that rape is rarely discussed by film critics. Because rape is so often presented as an analogy for something larger, she writes, “critics sometimes treat rape as something to step around in order to get to the “real” (and important) meaning”. When A Gentle Creature premiered Cannes Film Festival in 2017, it received positive media coverage from the usual suspects. The Telegraph, Variety, The Guardian, and Little White Lies all praised the film. “Persistently jaw-dropping”, gushed Robbie Collins in The Telegraph while The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called the film a “cathartic kind of horror” in his four-star review. None of the reviews by these publications mentioned the film’s rape scene or even the word “rape”, despite the scene being the most impactful, and arguably, the most important in the film. Only Leslie Felperin for The Hollywood Reporter discussed the rape scene, who was also the only woman to review A Gentle Creature for a major publication.
Seeing rape as pure metaphor is dangerous. As Russell articulates, if we prioritise metaphorical analogy over the “real” action and consequences of rape, “a hierarchy of masculine imagination over feminine body” is established. While Loznitsa uses rape as a metaphor to critique other types of political and social abuse – the patriarchal and authoritarian violence that those in power inflict on those who are most vulnerable – he does not take the time to reflect on the actual impact of this violence on those who are affected by it. Instead of examining the consequences of rape for the protagonist of A Gentle Creature, Loznitza reduces the act to representation, along with her body and character. Consequently, it is difficult for the audience to have empathy for the woman or be disturbed by the violence of rape. In a society with a deeply entrenched rape culture, the depiction of gendered violence in A Gentle Creature as something metaphorical, without bodies and repercussions, is an irresponsible abuse of artistic power – the exact thing Loznitza’s film is meant to be critiquing.
1 Schiebinger, Londa. Feminism and the Body (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.3
2 Russell, Dominque. Rape in Art Cinema (New York; London: Continuum, 2010), p.3
