DAU review – Ilya Krzhanovsky’s crazed Soviet inferno reaches its central character

Venice film festival: The director’s bleak epic project about the scientist Lev Landau finally focuses on the genius maudit who inspired the series How would it be if Christopher Nolan got sidetracked while making Oppenheimer, and decided to spend 20 years and millions of dollars of other people’s money reconstructing the Los Alamos HQ in all its minute detail, which would be the site of a gigantic immersive multimedia project, releasing epic and sexually explicit sidebar movies about … someone who worked in the commissary … or a scary incidental guy from the CIA … before finally getting round to the fundamental main-event movie with Cillian Murphy as the A-bomb’s father?

Perhaps it would be something like Ilya Krzhanovsky’s authentically mad, obsessively sexual, and spectacularly pessimistic epic project about the Soviet scientist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, or “Dau”, whose work spanned the 1920s to the postwar and cold war eras, and whose notional endorsement of free love the DAU movies escalate into a dissolute sex addiction.

Khrzhanovsky gives this a kind of classical Hellenic distinction by fictionalising a Greek background for our mysterious horny hero, whose indulgences c

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  DAU review – Ilya Krzhanovsky’s crazed Soviet inferno reaches its central character