There’s always something a little tragic about child prodigies. Either they make it through the growing pains of the peak of their fame or they succumb to the immense pressure thrust on them to continue and live up to whatever astronomical output put them on the map in the first place. Nika Turbina, child prodigy Russian poet who began her career at age 6 and died age 27, seems to have fallen into the latter category. Director and co-writer Vasilisa Kuzmina’s NIKA, written with Yulia Gulyan and making its world premiere at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, tells the story of Nika as she struggles to grapple with her own hopes and dreams in the face of a world who staunchly refuses to see her as anything more than what she was at her peak: a child prodigy and poet, destined for greatness and a comeback she does not necessarily wish to make. In fact, what Nika (Elizaveta Yankoskaya) wants most is a complete departure from her childhood path and a new beginning as an actress. While she fights for her spot at a drama school she only has one chance to audition for, her mother (Anna Mikhalkova) pressures her into finding a sponsor who will financially support them, banking on the draw of her allure as “the nation’s sweetheart” and a master poet. What unfolds as the two collide is a stifling drama of Nika’s battle for freedom from the clutches of her carefully curated identity, a meltdown, and painful truths about her career and volatile relationship with her mother.
I am more than a little ‘stitious about the concept of the 27 Club, that ill-fated collection of great artists whose output has solidified them as legends and whose lives were cut tragically short for various reasons. Discovering Nika Turbina as a member only added to the tragedy of what, by all appearances, seems to have been a tightly controlled and ultimately suffocated life. I could not, in pursuits to research her, find much other than the bare bones facts presented in NIKA—that she was 9 when she first published, at which point she won the Golden Lion of Venice award for her poetry and was hailed as the second coming of one of Russia’s most important poets, that she lost interest in pursuing poetry as a teenager, that she was depressed and struggled for the rest of her life to find connection to something. The nature of the cause of her death, a fall from her apartment’s 5th story window, remains ambiguous.
NIKA is an almost painfully intimate look into her life, carried beautifully by Yankoskaya’s performance. Her ability to embody the complexities of a woman who so clearly strained to find herself amidst a tendency to sabotage the relationships closest to her and fight against her past is heartbreaking. Her conversations with her younger self, through which she begins to uncover truths she, the movie posits, kept hidden even from herself, are the kindling for her eventual downward spiral and a poignant examination of how it looks to confront the way the world sees you with the way you see yourself. Even her love interest, Vanya (Ivan Fominov), occasionally hits her walls while trying to understand the best way to help her through the only lens he knows—her art. When her destructive tendencies become too much for him, she is left to grapple with herself, for better or worse, alone.
Mikhalkova’s turn as Nika’s mother paints a stunningly cruel and manipulative picture of a woman trying her damndest to live her dreams through her child in perhaps one of the most toxic ways imaginable. Whether it’s a true side or a fictionalized version, it casts Turbina’s life in a tragic light before she ever truly got a chance to live it, and makes clear how the pressure snuffed out the love she must have had for her art form in the beginning.
To watch NIKA is to witness the spark and burnout of a life freshly on the path to finding itself, to be smothered as a viewer by the sense of obligation and pressure that comes from having stardom before we even know what it all means, and to watch a woman desperately cling to her own dreams even as her life begins to crumble amid a society that has already imprisoned her in a box and decided she cannot leave it. At every turn people tell her she was one of the greatest living poets, but that if she failed at her new pursuit, she would not be able to cope, but she could survive the rest of her life reciting poems from her childhood, if only she would embrace the identity thrust upon her before she ever got to decide. We cast these kinds of molds on American celebrity figures all the time, and turn against them when they act counter to how we expect or if they make choices we deem scandalous. To watch the tail end of it in someone so young and clearly trying to rally against her boxed identity is a heart wrenching but perhaps necessary task. In the end, everyone is just people looking for the grace to be allowed to be themselves.
Tags: Anna Mikhalkova, Elizaveta Yankovskaya, Film Festivals, Ivan Fominov, Nika, Nika Turbina, SXSW, SXSW 2022, Vasilisa Kuzmina, Yulia Gulyan
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