The Student: Addicted to religion — a cautionary tale for our time

Karl Marx famously observed that religion is the opiate of the masses. Of course, he meant that in the way religion can pacify and control people. And like opium, religion can also make addicts of its adherents. 

Actually in full, Marx said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” That dual suffering and protest against the suffering is the premise of this startling and provocative Russian film The Student (Uchenik in Russia) directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. 

Based on Martyr, a theatre piece by Marius von Mayenburg, the writer and director Serebrennikov adapted this stage play for the cinema. Venya (Veniamin, Ben) is a high school student,16 or so, confused, brooding, adjusting to his newly pubescent body, wrestling with his religious beliefs, constantly pouring over his well thumbed copy of the Bible, quoting scripture ad nauseam, disrupting the classroom, combative with his mother, argumentative with his priest, rejecting and controlling of his friends. He’s an adolescent mess. 

Refusing to participate in required swim lessons because it’s a co-ed class and the girls wear bikinis, he finally gets an exemption. He soon grows confident that his strict and rigorous study of the Bible gives him the leeway to manipulate all forms of authority. He becomes rabid in his beliefs, angry, bitter, vindictive, using the Bible as his weapon of attack. Finally challenged by his atheistic and Jewish biology teacher who refuses to consent to his dogma, he sets out to eliminate her and subdue the entire community. The classroom is the crucible for this explosive, ever-escalating drama.

And we are all indicted in this drama. The exasperated mother (Julia Aug) defends her son at all costs though she’s quite perplexed by this new drug of his, telling him that she would prefer he collected stamps or just jerked off all the time, instead of hammering people with the Bible. The school principal (Svetlana Bragarnik) and other administrators try to placate his prejudices — antiSemitic, misogynist, homophobic — hoping not to trigger any more inflammatory outbursts. The biology teacher (Victoria Isakova) tolerates his obstreperous behavior and abusive attacks up to a point because “provocation is a cry for help.” She chalks it up to immaturity, finally losing her own liberal tolerance by slapping him and screaming to his mother that “you can’t make candy out of a piece of shit!”  

In Russian, with subtitles, and with a kinetic, even frenetic, camera that is never still, it’s a challenge to watch. But it is so rewarding to persevere with this beast of a film slouching out of Kaliningrad.

Just don't expect any easy answers in the age old conflicts between science and religion, received dogma and independent judgment, freedom and repression, ignorance and education. Let's teach both creationism and Darwinism, both climate change and denial, and let the student choose what he prefers. In our own contemporary American education climate, class syllabi should provide trigger warnings to protect sensitive students, and campuses should eliminate micro-aggressions that might threaten a student's well-being. As freedom of speech seems controlled by the loudest voice, education no longer challenges and changes students but only confirms what they already believe and feel. In this Russian classroom, it’s obvious that both Putin’s hegemony and the Russian church’s orthodoxy still dominate.

If this sounds like a slog through Marxist dialectics and Dostoevsky guilt, with doses of heavy handed moralizing, it is not! For sure, the boy’s inability to talk except in his insufferable scriptural admonitions is infuriating. But there is so much swirling in this young man’s mind and body, and soul, I should add, that the viewer is not wearied with the gravity of it all, but intrigued by the dilemma.

With the look of the dour and elongated saints of the Byzantine churches, he seems to ache under the weight of his newfound beliefs. Not to press the religious parallels too much — Venya as a thin, ascetic prophet, Lidia (Aleksandra Revenko) as his temptress, Grigoriy (Aleksandr Gorchilin) as a besotted cripple eager to be healed — well, we have a triptych-worthy icon straight off the altarpiece, only missing an apocalyptic final panel.

The actor portraying this troubled teen is Petr Skvortsov. His next role should be Hamlet, a character equally torn between his worlds of enlightened reason and medieval superstition. Skvortsov has the perfect face, body, and demeanor to portray Hamlet’s brooding countenance and gloomy interior, and here he adds Venya’s full frontal glory to the religious fanaticism. Though he protests against the indecency of girls and boys swimming together, he doesn’t seem to mind his very public nudity, in the classroom no less, now protesting a sex ed lesson on condom use. I can’t imagine this scene in an American film unless it was played for giggles and nervous laughs.

It is dark, moody, foreboding. His home is claustrophobic with clashing floral wallpapers. His room is shadowy with spots of occasional light on his sullen face. Yet the darkness and shadows are punctuated with bursts of light, shafts of sunlight as through a church’s arched windows, a swimming pool lit from below, a science classroom pinging with florescent light and portrait of Putin on the wall. Cinematography is by Vladislav Opelyants whose camera never stops moving. He uses a hand held camera for these frantic, feverish shots, oblique angles, half darkened frames, that then slide into long and lyrical tracking and sequence shots. 

Oddly, and jarringly, and appropriately, and exhaustively, the film is both staccato and silky.  As is the student himself.

With his perverse earnestness and very frightening fanaticism, bordering on madness, the character and actor are so alluring, but the film so open ended and ambivalent, we have to wonder just what position the director is taking about the dangers of such fundamentalism.

For sure, addiction has never been more magnetic and irresistible.

This article appears in Apr 20-27, 2017.