There is a strange quiet that settles in before a storm. Not the kind you watch out a window with a cup of tea. The kind that creeps into the room and sits with you when the newspapers still arrive and the theaters are open and friends bake cakes on a weeknight. Everything looks fine at a glance. People work. They go on dates. They crack jokes about politics and scroll through news that makes them feel sick, and then they try to sleep. The next morning they do it all again. That silence is where Julia Loktev begins.
My Undesirable Friends Part One Last Air in Moscow is a five hour documentary made up of five chapters that are now playing at Film Forum in New York City. The structure is simple on paper. You settle in with a handful of journalists and their friends in Russia in the years and months before the invasion of Ukraine and just after it begins. There is an intermission. Time passes between conversations, and you feel it pass. The choice is not just formal. It is moral. Loktev is not chasing drama from one explosion to the next. She lets the ground move slowly under your feet so that when you finally notice the floor is different, you realize you were watching the change happen all along.
Her friends are reporters and editors who have spent years trying to say true things in a place where truth is treated like contraband. They are smart and funny and they tease each other. They gather in kitchens and small rooms, and they do the most normal things. Anna Nemzer, who works for the independent station TV Rain, kneads dough for bread in one scene, her arms working the anger out of her shoulders as she talks through the news of the day. Someone else bakes a cake with her girlfriend. Someone else rolls a cigarette. The camera lingers close enough that you feel like you are at the edge of the couch. It is cozy and familiar, which is exactly what makes it so devastating.
The project began when Loktev went home to film her friends as they wrestled with a new order that forced them to label themselves as foreign agents. That is a loaded phrase in any country. In theirs it became a brand that was meant to humiliate and isolate. They try to work out the rules. Do they have to put the warning on their social media accounts. On a grocery list. On a text. They laugh because what else are you supposed to do. A gaggle of them even dress up like James Bond for a photo shoot that never came out, a cheeky in joke about their new status as agents. The humor is a survival tool. It is also a reminder that telling the truth becomes political the moment power decides it is.
Watching these conversations unfold is not like watching a thriller where the city is on fire and the hero has an hour to save it. There are no sirens in the first half. There is just the symptomless illness of a country being prepared for war. You and I know what is coming. We know that tanks will cross a border and that laws will change overnight. The people on screen know only that something is wrong. They carry the dread in their shoulders and they do their jobs anyway. It is almost unbearable.
Loktev keeps the lens just a few feet from faces. No sweeping drone shots of skylines. No thundering score. Just breath, glass on a table, hands stirring batter, the glow of a phone. She gives people space to stammer and meander and circle back. She lets them sit in silence. That closeness is not a trick. It is the essence of the movie. It places you inside the insulated bubble of friends who are trying to live while the rules of living are being rearranged around them. The five hours give the film an odd buoyancy. You are not counting minutes. You are measuring the distance between hope and resignation.
The break between the two parts lands around February of 2022. You can feel the temperature change even before the explosion of headlines. The legal tightening becomes literal. The newsrooms that tried to carve out a space for critical reporting are squeezed. People stop laughing as much. They start to plan exits, or at least talk about them out loud. Maybe that is why the conversations in the early stretches feel so precious. Friends trying on the weight of a label like foreign agent and making jokes about it feels harmless until it is not harmless at all. You see the trap close.
I kept thinking about how authoritarianism rarely rides in on a wave big enough to knock you off your feet in one shot. It spreads like ripples across a lake, bumping one dock, then the next. The journalists here are shoved into the water one rule at a time. The country has not fallen apart. Not yet. It is worse in a way. The country has continued. People still go to the movies. They still get married. They still take trains. They adapt. That is what people do. They adapt to the unthinkable and then later call it inevitable. This movie is a record of the moments when adaptation feels both necessary and like a small betrayal of your future self.
You hear questions that do not have answers. Who is even watching. Does any of this matter. Are we just shouting into a hole in the ground. How do you begin to be honest in a place that is allergic to memory. An entire human rights organization called Memorial, an institution dedicated to keeping the record of abuses and victims alive, gets dissolved by the state just before the war. We see an event marking its closure. There is grief in the room. There is also a kind of stubborn calm. If a society is encouraged to forget, then what is left for those who insist on remembering. Maybe a camera. Maybe a stack of notebooks. Maybe a film like this.
The carefulness of Loktev’s choices is almost invisible. You feel it more than you see it. The way she selects clips from the news. The particular moment she turns her lens toward a pair of hands instead of a talking head. The way she steps aside so her friends can argue and repeat themselves and then arrive at a thought that hurts to say out loud. In less patient hands this material could have been didactic. It could have been a checklist of atrocities. She avoids the lecture. She brings you into a room and you overhear history. That is harder to do than it sounds. It takes restraint. It takes faith in the small and the present.
There is one person here I will not forget. Ksyusha. Her partner is in prison on political charges, and that fact runs through every scene she is in like a wire you do not want to touch. She is tired and very brave. It is not movie bravery. It is the kind where you get up and put on your shoes and go outside and say what you think and try not to break down when you get home. The film does not tell you to admire her. It just lets you sit with her. You do the rest.
There is another moment that has stayed with me. Anna is making bread. It is such a basic act and I almost thought nothing of it. Then she starts pounding the dough and talking about fear and rage and exhaustion and I realized the kitchen was where she had to put all of that feeling because there was nowhere else safe enough. That is the private toll the film understands. Not just arrests and raids and shuttered stations. The thousands of little leaks of human energy as people try to hold themselves together in public.
This is not only a story about Russia. It is also a dispatch from the front lines of a global problem that we like to minimize. What happens to a culture when journalism is framed as treachery. When truthful speech is treated as an offense. When a state sets fire to the archive so the past cannot argue back. The attack on Memorial is part of that puzzle. So are other attempts elsewhere to belittle or sanitize museums and curators and educators who preserve ugly truths. You do not have to share a political party to recognize the pattern. Power prefers amnesia. The rest of us cannot afford it.
There was a recent burst of headlines in the United States about criticism of the Smithsonian for dwelling on the painful parts of American history. I do not need to weigh in on the phrasing to point out the obvious through line. We do not learn better futures by scrubbing the old stains out of the record. We learn by looking, by naming, by listening. Loktev’s film doubles as a case for that kind of attention. It is not about perfect heroes telling you what to think. It is about ordinary people who are punished for being accurate.
The title makes sense as the hours go by. Last Air in Moscow sounds dramatic at first, but the experience is not theatrical. Air is what you breathe, and it is the one thing you cannot see until it gets thin. The people here are trying to breathe while their city closes its windows. At one point they joke about espionage imagery and the glamour of spies. Then they go home to make tea because the joke is only funny for a second and the rest of the night is still long.
There is a formal elegance to how the timeline is arranged. The earlier passages unfold with the rhythm of a long afternoon. You lean back. You half smile. You feel safe. The later ones have a helplessness that creeps up through the floorboards. Someone whispers about leaving. Someone else wonders what will happen to parents if they go. There are tears. There is also a stubborn streak that runs through every conversation. The refusal to stop talking. What an act of defiance that is. To continue to speak when speaking no longer guarantees you will be heard.
It is easy to imagine a different cut of this movie that tried to summarize a nation in bullet points. That sprinted from decree to decree. That marrow was not what Loktev wanted. She wanted proximity. She wanted to slow your breathing down to match the people on screen. And by doing that, she traps you in the same moral maze. If you were them, when would you leave. Would you label your work without protest if the law demanded it. Would you tell yourself you could always push back later. This film refuses to do that math for you. It just asks you to show your work.
The notion that history repeats itself if you refuse to face it is not new. Every generation relearns it and then tries to forget because it is heavy to carry daily. The trouble is that forgetting does not make the danger go away. It makes it sneakier. This movie is not a loud siren. It is a reminder left on the kitchen table that says please do not get used to this. Look at what is happening to people who are doing their best to tell us what is happening.
I do not want to make it sound like a homework assignment. It is not. It is alive. There are smiles and half jokes and a ridiculous photo idea with Bond style costumes that they never used. There is a sense of friendship that you can feel without the movie selling it to you. It matters that this is made by someone who loves the people she is filming. That love gives the film a softness at the edges even when the center is hard to bear. It also keeps it honest. She does not flatter them. She does not turn them into symbols. She lets them be limited and scared and stubborn and sometimes wrong. That is the only way to believe them when they are right.
As I think back on the five hours, I realize how little happens in a conventional sense. Meetings. Meals. A small gathering to mark the end of a human rights group that should never have needed to exist in the first place. Yet by the end you feel spent. Not because you watched explosions or loud speeches, but because you have shared the slow erosion of a set of lives. That pace is part of the warning. Countries do not often tumble into the dark. They drift.
A question that hovers over everything is whether any of this effort lands. The reports, the editorials, the interviews, the late night calls to sources, the careful wording that might keep someone out of jail. Does it hit a reader who matters. A voter. A judge. Or is it swallowed by the churn. I do not have a satisfying answer. The film does not either. It treats the work itself as a form of meaning. You tell the truth because it is the truth. You keep a record because someday records will be the only proof we have that we were not all asleep.
I cannot pretend there is an easy way to watch this. There are stretches where the dread is like a weight on your lap. But there is also a certain relief in spending time with people who refuse to lie to themselves. It is not a cure. It is air. Thin maybe, but real. You leave the theater and the city outside looks the same. Your phone still buzzes. Your life is still yours. And then, in a small quiet way, you see how quickly normal can accept almost anything if no one holds it to account. That realization is part of the film too. It travels with you.
Julia Loktev has made something precise and generous. She has trusted the audience to notice what is going on in the corners of the frame. She has trusted her friends to carry their own story without speeches. She has trusted time to reveal what it always reveals. The bravery we celebrate often shows up in the most domestic spaces. The moral choices are rarely framed by trumpets. They are set on hairline cracks that run across kitchen tables, and the camera sits there and waits.
By the end, the warning embedded in the footage is impossible to ignore. Societies can go backward. It does not take a loud villain delivering a monologue. It takes small edits to the meaning of words. It takes jokes that ease us into compliance. It takes shutting down an archive here and a newsroom there and calling it routine. If that sounds familiar in other places, that is because it is. The details change. The muscle memory does not. Which is why a film like this matters. It does more than document a crisis. It gives you a way to feel the cost.
You will meet people inside it whom you might never meet otherwise. You will hear their questions and you will think about your own. You will not get tidy conclusions. You will get a record. And in a time that is allergic to records, that is no small gift. The quiet before the storm is not a myth. It is an atmosphere. This movie captures it so clearly that you might find yourself holding your breath. Then you will remember to breathe. And you will hope it is not the last air anyone needs to borrow.
