Give Me Liberty: An American Fever Dream
Written in September 2019
The day is chaotic from its very start. “деда, wake up,” Vic mumbles at the crack of dawn, before embarking on the difficult task of getting his senile grandfather ready for a funeral. This old man is a relic from a faraway time and place, muttering Russian war songs and bludgeoning a raw chicken with a dumbbell in an explosion of manic confusion — all before breakfast. Over the course of the next few hours, medical transport van driver Vic helps a blind and morbidly obese man get dressed and brush his teeth, carries a mattress upstairs so a young wheelchair user can leave the house, is badgered by his boss for being late, returns home to find that his grandfather has burnt the chicken (filling the entire floor with smoke and risking eviction for them both), and discovers that the bus meant to transport a horde of elderly Russian-Jewish relatives to great-aunt Lilya’s funeral never showed up. And so begins one of the most dizzying, unassumingly beautiful, and thoroughly American films I’ve seen in recent years.
It’s difficult to imagine the pitch for Kirill Mikhanovsky’s second feature, Give Me Liberty: a film which, in its blurry swirl of characters and energies, languages and lurches, is as tied to the American Dream as its title suggests. Let’s take a stab at it: “In Milwaukee, during police brutality-fueled protests, we are thrust into a day in the chaotic life of Vic — a twenty-something son of Russian immigrants and a transport driver for people with disabilities — as he risks his job and sanity to chauffeur his elderly relatives to Great-Aunt Lilya’s funeral.” This sentence, though perhaps sufficient in describing the rough outline of the film, scarcely demonstrates its depth and singularity. The film is set in the freezing Midwest, but is composed of a blend of English and Russian, and makes use of a mix of local unknown actors and non-professionals, many of whom have physical and/or intellectual disabilities. Especially given that the on-location production was dropped by a more prominent distributor just before filming started, Give Me Liberty stands as a rebellious indie accomplishment, a testament to the singular power of microbudget filmmaking and to the beauty of American chaos.
Over the course of the film, we are whirled dizzily through a hodge-podge of vignettes, hurtling down Milwaukee sidestreets with nauseating speed. Vic is the man in charge of taking care of everyone, while frantically reassuring his boss via walkie-talkie (what seems like a thousand times over) that he’ll “be there in ten, I swear.” The eccentric mix of passengers who end up worming their way into this story includes a throng of elderly mourners, among them an accordionist and a diabetic who goes into shock; Dima (Maxim Stoyanov), a charismatic Russian boxer who claims to be the nephew of the deceased, but may just be a loveable scam artist; Tracy (Lolo Spencer), a shrewd young black woman with ALS and advocate for people with disabilities; Vic’s mother (Zoya Makhlina), a widowed pianist who has mangled her nerves from too much playing and fears that her ambitionless son is going nowhere; Tracy’s mother (Sheryl Sims-Daniels), whose own son’s rapping dreams spark conflict at the dinner table…and so on. It is through this raw, humanist portrait of those pushed furthest to the margins of American society — immigrants, black people, disabled people, poor people, the elderly, Eastern European Jews with the little money they have stuffed between sofa cushions — that we are able to see a rarely recognized, boldly true face of America.
Given Milwaukee’s status as America’s most segregated metro area, the intertwining of races and nationalities in Give Me Liberty, superimposed atop the backdrop of police brutality, is undoubtedly political. In the midst of this segregated city, cloaked in poverty and violence, the American Dream seems more of a delusion than anything. Many characters, especially the immigrants, seem obsessed by this idea of the American Dream, but this Dream has done little for them. Vic’s mother is ashamed that her son never became “somebody” in her estimation; his sister (Darya Ekamasova) is a young widow whose husband’s sudden death left her pregnant and alone; Dima idolizes American fighters, exclaiming to Tracy that he “loves black people” and showing her a laminated picture of Mike Tyson in his wallet whilst they ride through the most segregated city in the country; demonstrations against the fatal shooting of Sylville K. Smith, a black man killed by Milwaukee police in 2016, explode into still more eruptions of police violence against protestors… Wherever is this American Dream, anyways? What we find as we sift through the flotsam and jetsam of Vic’s day is a series of ordinary moments that, upon further examination, lay bare the contradictions and disorder inherent in American life.
Though shot in a handheld, cinéma vérité style, Give Me Liberty is tinged with a strange sort of beauty. This element, this special something, seeps in through expressionistic aesthetic choices weaved subtly into the film. During a particularly tender sequence, in which Vic shows Tracy how to fashion a makeshift phonograph out of a pencil, a needle, and a rolled up piece of paper, the distorted noises from the grooves of the record meld seamlessly into the lush “Holocene” by Bon Iver (himself a Wisconsinite). Often, at the beginning of a scene, the audio can be heard before the image switches over — placing us, much like Vic, in a perpetual state of disorientation and catch-up. In certain scenes, black and white footage is intercut with color, and portions were shot on film using an old Russian wind-up camera. In one scene, we see one of the old babushkas watching with wonder as a profoundly disabled young man (Gregory Merzlak) fills pages and pages with colorful nature drawings. These vivid illustrations return later in an otherworldly sequence, where sheets of Merzlak’s artwork surround Vic on all sides until he collapses, immersed in a blissful, delicious universe of felt-tip pen trees.
Newcomer Chris Galust, who stars as Vic, is a revelation. An electrician from Brighton Beach, he was plucked from a Brooklyn bakery by talent scout Jennifer Venditti while, ironically, buying a birthday cake for his own russian grandfather. Venditti has become known over the past twenty years for her nontraditional approach to casting (of which the Safdie brothers’ 2017 neon-noir, pulpy thriller Good Time is a great example), gathering non-professional actors from the communities they are meant to be a part of, and treating that search as an essential part of world-building. Galust is a natural onscreen, exuding humor and goodness even in moments of great tension and stress. As much as this is a chronicle of the array of characters who somehow end up on this bus together, it is a portrait of Vic: a man whose job it is to take care of others, to get the people who depend on him where they need to go.
Some filmgoers might get motion sickness, arguing that Give Me Liberty’s rambling structure is disorganized. The plot is unpredictable, threads are left loose, and certain sequences (though injected with a humorous twinge by Alice Austen’s dialogue) seem to meander and drag on. However, there is an important distinction to be drawn here between chaos and disorganization. A day in the life of Vic, someone on whom so many people depend to help with their basic daily necessities, calls for a treatment that is disorienting, often uncomfortable. In his raw, humanist way, Mikhanovsky knows exactly what he’s doing.
Source links:
http://moveablefest.com/jennifer-venditti-good-time/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/give-me-liberty-film-review-sundance-2019-1177707
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4169146/?ref_=m_ttfc_tt
https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/milwaukee-shows-what-segregation-does-to-american-cities.html
