Russian writer-director Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Student (Uchenik),” screening in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, is a satirical black comedy hell-bent on demonstrating that, at the core of establishment religion, lies a zealous heart fuelled by dogma beamed down from God-knows-where — crazy talk and even crazier behavior, in other words, meant to be defining characteristics of those who would separate the flock from the herd. The teenaged Venya — played with skillful ruthlessness by Petr Skvortsov, whose brooding appearance recalls a young Michael Shannon — comes to possess a fanatic’s dependence on Biblical scripture as a blueprint for living, teasing then tormenting classmates and teachers into second guessing the moral trajectories of the curriculum, while exposing institutional hypocrisies that pit the faculty against the very system which enables them. In no time, the wannabe Apostle has the dress code at the high school swimming pool changed to something a lot less risqué than the girls’ accustomed bikini, and has the Principle pondering the notion of the world having been a week-long construction.As Venya lobs one holy hand grenade after another, reciting Mark or Matthew or John, only biology teacher Elena (Victoria Isakova) has the guts to take his gloomy pronouncements to task as the scientifically improbable non-sequiturs they are, often to the detriment of her career. It’s a tragicomic relationship that would have seemed prescient only a short time ago, before the rise of social justice-branded hysteria culminated in trigger warnings, safe spaces, and Ivy League resignations.Adapted from German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s “Martyr,” Serebrennikov’s film fantasizes scholastic revolt in the tradition of films like Lindsay Anderson’s “If…” (1968) and Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” (2003), but weirdly reduces the spiritual quest for autonomy that “The Student” hints at to bratty characterizations and a woeful, academic drag of battling ideologies. Serebrennikov wants us only to see religion as politicking indulgence and divisional force; trendy New Atheist suspicions turned snide and smug. As Venya’s preaching grows more and more inflammatory, and his actions become violent, “The Student” attempts to dupe the audience into Dawkins-approved self-congratulation for pointing to religion, as opposed to a mentally ill protagonist, as the allegorical culprit, here, for societal disintegration. Paul Dano’s sickly preacher in “There Will Be Blood” (2007) may have been the avatar for similar ills, but his motives were rotted adherents to human, not spiritual, travails. There are implications made here, too, about the source of Veniamin’s born again soon, but they remain vague and Freudian superficial. When his only disciple, a disabled teen played empathetically by Aleksandr Gorchilin, expresses sexual attraction for the unholy delinquent, we’re expected to buy into the old canard of libidinal impulse as justification for self-imposed, self-loathed indoctrination. Where their relationship ends, on the rocky shores of Russian exclave Kaliningrad — here portrayed as a post-Soviet Paradise — is beautifully, majestically photographed by cinematographer Vladislav Opelyants, whose handheld camera sweeps and glides in and out of the classroom with Ophulian elegance.But there seems to be little room these days, exemplified by the success of “Spotlight” (2015), for films that speak deeply of Christian spiritualism, like Rossellini’s “The Flowers of St. Francis” (1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” (1966). It’s become all too fashionable and pedantic for filmmakers to gnash their teeth at the religious right, rather than concern themselves with an empathetic portrayal of the Individual’s struggle in distinguishing the tangible from the immaterial.
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