Breakfast with scott burns

By Deborah Stoll

"The smallest and most meaningful unit in any society is family". This line stays with me weeks after seeing Scott Burns's darkly beautiful and surprisingly funny film, "PU-239", which first aired on HBO in November. Based on a short story by Ken Kalfus, it follows a devoted father in post-Soviet Russia who gets exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. In order to provide for his family, he steals some plutonium and joins forces with an inept gangster (played by the incredibly talented Oscar Isaac). Together they form an awkward friendship, forged by a willingness to sacrifice everything for family.

The film, Burns's first with a written/directed-by credit, is a highly stylised study in opposites. His two main characters inhabit contrasting colour palates--an effectively claustrophobic technique that hints at a future collision between these two hued worlds, to devastating effect. "I wanted the world where Timofey (the devoted father, played by Paddy Considine) comes from to be a bleached out, green environment, as though it had been radiated," Burns explains to me in a restaurant in Venice (lo, California, not Italy). We are having breakfast, and the reliable sun streaks through the room as Manu Chao's "Luna y Sol" plays in the background. "In Moscow, it was all about a really saturated palette, moving the camera, crossing the line." The way Burns describes colour and composition, I am hardly surprised to hear him describe early dreams of becoming a fine artist. Yet, he admits, "I'm a terrible painter. And I can't draw."