5 Days of Oscar Docs: Navalny
A week-long guide to the Academy Awards' strongest and most overlooked category.
In the opening scene of Navalny, the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny looks into the camera and makes his pitch to director Daniel Roher: “Let’s make a thriller out of this film.” The moment of direct address introduces us to Navalny as a man intent on shaping his own image, one who both seems to abhor boredom and knows that in an environment where attention is his most powerful weapon, letting the audience’s mind wander even for a second could be fatal. But it’s also because he’s always contemplating the reality that at any moment, the images of him might be all that’s left. And so he concedes, a little: If I’m killed before you finish, he tells Roher, you can make a boring movie instead.
Because the movie mostly follows Navalnvy as he’s recuperating in exile after the Russian government attempted to poison him in August of 2020, we don’t see much of him addressing the crowds that have made him the most formidable threat to Vladimir Putin’s authortitarian rule. Instead, he says, he’s “a slave of Thursdays,” the day of the week on which he uploads fresh content to his YouTube channel. Unable to hold rallies, he applies himself to mastering TikTok, because in a country where the media is controled by a ruler who refuses to even speak Navalny’s name aloud, a viral clip of Navalny lip-synching to OMC’s “How Bizarre” can still break through the walls.
Roher gets his thriller, all right, especially in an astonishing sequence in which Navalny, working alongside Christo Grozev of the independent investigative journalism organization Bellingcat, effectively solves the mystery of his own attempted murder. I won’t spoil how it happens, except to say that it’s the kind of sequence where your astonishment at what’s happening is doubled by the staggering luck that a camera was there to capture it. Except, of course, that is isn’t luck. The staging is deliberate, and if the outcome was unforeseeable, the result was still prepared for and ready to be shared with the world. Even if your life is a thriller, you have to make sure you’re in the right kind, and not one where the hero is the only one who knows the terrible truth and eventually dies alone, trying to make others believe.
In the end, Navalny gets his “boring movie,” too, the one about a loving father and husband who is now in “permanent solitary confinement” and facing charges from that could extend his sentence by decades. It’s also one that shows his strength to people he can’t see face to face, and ends with the hope for a future, even if it’s not his.
Navalny is now streaming on HBO Max.
Previously: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, All That Breathes, A House Made of Splinters