(the seattle international film festival kicks off on 25 may. press screenings started earlier this month; so throughout the festival, we’ll try to make a habit of posting short reviews to help you wade through the catalog.)

Perhaps there is a reason that Russia isn’t the first country to spring to mind when we think of the Beautiful Game. The Russians suffered a devastating loss to the Germans in the 1912 Stockholm Games. The defeat of their country’s team has serious repercussions for the teens at the center of Garpastum [siff]. As the world is gearing up for it’s first World War, they’re soccer-obsessed teens in End of the Epoch St. Petersburg.

Sure, Alexey and Nikola go to ceremonial airplane demonstration picnics, study gynecology manuals, hang out in salons with famous poets (one even has a lot of hot sex with one of the hosts of the avant garde parties), but mostly they play football whenever possible, usually in freshly pressed suits. Their teammates are younger kids — one lazy-eyed and small, the other is only known as “Fatso”. Just as they’re shut out of tryouts for an English-based team, the war erupts, and they hatch a plan to start their own league using a field that they plan to buy from a shady Tatar merchant. You can tell that this isn’t a mainstream sports pic right away because of the dozens of football scenes, not a single one has the soaring hopeful score that we’ve come to expect when athletics are meant to be inspirational.

Even though they call it the Silver Age, turn of the century Russia is pretty damn bleak. You can tell by the muted palette — there’s barely any color in the film, even though it’s not shot in black and white — and all of the fog that shrouds St. Petersburg as the guys play a series soccer matches — behind an empty factory, a cathedral alley, and in the street — to win rubles for their dream team. The color scheme, the offstage assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and the looming war, don’t bode well for a happy ending. Along the way plenty of family drama, love and loss, and unexpected senseless violence reward your suspicion that bad things linger on the horizon.

If you’re into it, the urban industrial setting in muted colors is nicely shot and the actors are attractive enough. But for a movie about guys who adore a sport, their motivation for obsession with the game or anything else is a bit less than convincing. Maybe that even this distraction doesn’t provide a great deal of pleasure is a sign of their time and setting, but it also makes it difficult to get attached to anyone. Eventually, though, it begins to feel like a lot of pain and suffering for its own sake without enough investment.

*North American Premiere* (8 & 10 June)