LITMIR.BIZ

      THE SCREEN OF THE CRIME

      by Kim Newman

      Sherlok Kholms

      In 2013, writer-director Andrey Kavan made a Sherlok Kholms series for Russian television, consisting of six feature-length episodes. It has turned up on youtube with fan-made sub-titles. Its approach to the Conan Doyle source material might once have been considered radical, though now it’s almost a default to throw away the deerstalker and the meticulous unflappability to present a stubbled, slovenly bipolar Holmes and a PST-suffering Watson pitted against a chaotic, corrupt world with much contemporary resonance. If you think the BBC’s current Sherlock is overshadowed by its Watson’s hard times in a more recent Afghan war than the one Doyle wrote about, imagine how Russians feel about that blood-soaked patch of the world map. Unlike Sherlock and Elementary, Sherlok Kholms doesn’t relocate the characters to a contemporary setting—but it goes further than Guy Ritchie’s films in finding Victorian parallels for the way things are today.

      In 1979, then-Soviet television produced a fond (and fondly-remembered) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson with Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin as a genial sleuth and his intrepid sidekick. Sherlok Kholms positions itself as radically different from this show, but is structurally rather close to it—with miniseries-like overall arcs to do with the developing relationship of Holmes and Watson and the shadow of Moriarty, and key stories pulled out of canonical order and slotted in to highlight the lead characters. The older show presented its heroes in a nostalgic light—expressing a peculiarly Russian anglophilia—and stressed comradeship and noble endeavour, but the new take is complicated and sometimes uncomfortable. A sub-plot has Watson (Andrey Panin) struggling to become a writer, debating with a publisher about how to make his accounts of thorny real stories more saleable. This suggests that the versions we’re familiar with are removed from a truth we are only now being let in on. Throughout, characters say or do things this Watson could never put in print—Watson’s marriage proposal to Mrs Hudson (Ingeborna Dapkunaite) is astonishing enough without the throwaway revelation (unthinkable in any British or American Doyle adaptation) that much of the doctor’s struggling practice involves performing ‘underground abortions’. The approach has some textural precedent in that Doyle has Holmes complain about the way Watson dramatises their cases, but this goes further even than The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes or Mr Holmes in making its takes on Doyle’s characters vastly different from the ones found on the page. There’s a sustained riff on the adverse reactions of the people involved when Watson’s stories see print: Mrs Hudson resents being represented as ‘am old granny’ and gives him till the end of the month to get out of 221B ….

      The first episode, Beyker Strit, 221B (Baker Street 221B), opens with exactly the quotation about the Afghan War from A Study in Scarlet used in The Abominable Bride (‘the campaign brought honours and promotion to many but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster’) as Watson returns to London, ‘health irreparably damaged’, and is drawn into an alliance with Holmes. In an unusual selection, their first case is ‘Black Peter’, with Aleksandr Ilin as a suitably imposing, impaled dastard. In suitably dramatic fashion, Watson meets Holmes (Igor Petrenko) over a corpse lying in the street and wind up in separate quarters at 221B. This Watson is balding, moustached and more affected psychologically than physically by the war—and Panin, who narrates and frames each episode scratching away with his pen, is the lead actor here. Petrenko’s Holmes looks and acts more like a revolutionary poet than a detective: unshaven, fiddling with rimless glasses, getting drunk rather than taking drugs, treated pretty much as a criminal busybody by the police and flattened in his first ‘boxing lesson’ with Watson. A very Russian take on male bonding involves hard liquour, pugilism and tears. There’s a running joke as Watson assumes several fussy little old ladies in and around Baker Street are his new landlady … only for the slim, glamorous Dapkunaite to show up at the end (the biggest star in the show, the Lithuanian actress was in Burnt By the Sun and has English language credits in Mission: Impossible, Shadow of the Vampire, Prime Suspect and Wallander) and strike sparks with the retiring doctor.

      Kamen, Nozhnitsy, Bumaga (Rock, Paper, Scissors) is a loose adaptation of The Sign of Four, which quickly manages to introduce Irene Adler (a lively, lissom Lyanka Gryu), Mycroft (whose face isn’t shown—setting up a payoff we have to wait six episodes for) and the malign influence of Moriarty. Here, Watson is involved in the backstory of the Agra treasure as a comrade of the guilty officers—who have returned to London and become a criminal gang, working as cabdrivers to expedite burglaries. Holmes is drawn into the case when Peter Small (Mikhail Evlanov), an old comrade of Watson’s, shows up in Baker St badly wounded, taking advantage of the special rates Watson offers for veterans. In the finale, the detective is shut out of a duel at an officers’ club between a grim Watson and virulent racist Thad Sholto (Igor Skylar). Your assumptions about the politics of Russian popular entertainment might well be challenged by the way the villain of the piece spouts anti-immigrant/refugee sentiments which sound horribly familiar in the 21st century … and is roundly condemned for it. The scene has added bite in that several of the extras are visibly and genuinely scarred—are they real veterans of the USSR’s Afghan campaign? In a later episode, Watson’s publisher tells him to drop the ‘chauvinist officer’ and the politics and invent a romance to dress up the story. Here, Mary (Elizaveta Alekseeva) is Small’s orphan daughter and it’s Holmes who sends her an annual pearl (for her board and education) from the otherwise lost treasure; we’re to infer that Watson spins this into the love story of The Sign of Four, and that the imaginary romance is another thing that irritates Mrs Hudson about Watson’s writing.

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