Alena Lodkina’s second feature, “Petrol,” explores the metaphysical dimensions of a new friendship.
“Petrol” begins when a college filmmaking student named Eva turns up with recording equipment on a rocky beachfront, where a small crew of other young filmmakers is making a movie . For Eva’s thesis film, she is working on an experimental documentary portrait of an older Russian woman named Bella , a woman of a mystical bent; Eva is collecting ocean sounds as an adornment to the film’s soundtrack.
Their mutual echoes are quiet but decisive. Mia has a vague feeling that they’ve met before, and she has her own supra-artistic ambition to “really live.” And Mia’s late sister was also named Eva. A friendship quickly follows; Eva accepts Mia’s invitation to move into a spare room in her lavish, borrowed house.
Mia reflects, on camera, about the experience of being filmed, the relinquishing of control that it entails, and the unexpected discoveries about oneself that can result.
Lodkina tenderly sketches Eva’s family life—her parents, who are Russian émigrés, speak Russian at home, are haunted by their home country’s tyrant, and are dominated by its high-cultural legacy, which they transmit to Eva as a part of their normal daily activities.
The film also delivers wry, pinpoint satire about the cultural realms that it inhabits: its wealthy, bourgeois collectors and their anti-capitalist artist son, the film students obsessed withand Leonardo DiCaprio, “Titanic” and the violent genre conventions. As the action advances, Lodkina sees Eva leaving behind the monumental but remote ideals of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Beethoven for an experiential idealism of travel, nature, exploration, and even fun.
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