THE SAND CASTLE

IN THEORY, I’VE COME TO PARIS AS A FILM CRITIC, BUT MAYBE I’m bringing the wrong set of tools to this job. Ostensibly, Dau, the much-anticipated multimedia project by Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, is a film, or a series of films. But it also claims to be something more: as the publicity material puts it, “a pluridisciplinary epic project,” existing “at the intersection of film, science, performance, spirituality, social and artistic experimentation, literature, and architecture.” Maybe the standard criteria of cinema don’t apply; standard moviemaking methods certainly don’t.

Dau premiered in January in Paris, trailing a uniquely enigmatic backstory. In 2006, Khrzhanovsky began work on his second feature, conceived as a biopic of the Nobel-winning Soviet physicist Lev Landau (1908-1968). But Khrzhanovsky decided that the project needed to be more ambitious: the film, called Dau after its fictional central figure, would span several decades and the production would involve the building, near Kharkov in Ukraine, of a massive space representing the research center where Dau, his family, and his colleagues lived for 30 years.

What became known as the “Institute” wasn’t just a set, but a self-contained building in which the film’s participants—several hundred of them—cohabited full-time over the Institute’s threeyear existence, required to live, work, dress, and eat in conditions that replicated Soviet times. The cast, nonprofessionals except for one