Edward Crabtree

SHADOWY, TWISTY AND MUST-SEE.

Russian television goes Scandinoir – and it works.

Caught between the pincers of the pandemic on the one hand and the war with Ukraine on the other, the television psycho-thriller Cold Shores (Holodniye Berega) and its second season of July 2022 Cold Shores Return (Holdniye Berega: Vozrasheniye) first reached the Russian viewing public on October 14^th three years ago in the form of 8 fifty minute episodes.

Coming from the unexpected source of Star Media, purveyors of heartwarming family melodramas, this small screen classic is what I would show to someone should I want to provide them with an example of Russian television at its best.

It says a lot that the user reviews of this show have been positive, even if some of the local critics have been a bit guarded. The biggest caveat I can make to add to the endorsement which follows is that this glitzy whodunnit does owe a great debt to certain crime dramas that have been coming out of Denmark and Sweden for the last decade.

Monster in a gated city.

Set in the closed off plutonium enriched city of Ozerk, the show was in fact filmed in Rybinsk in the Yaroslavl region.

The core premise – even with all of its misdirection – could not be simpler. In the winter months, a serial strangler of women is menacing the city. The perpetrator targets women with a particular look and removes their wedding rings and sometimes disfigures them.

A rookie police investigator and Daddy’s Girl (whose father is a top brass in the force himself) comes to be charged with overseeing this perplexing case. Her name is Alina Novinsky.

Ekaterina Vilkova is Alena Nevisnky [E.Kinorium.com]

You will get no spoilers from me and just reiterating the plot details could not do justice to the impact it has anyway. Suffice it to say that Alina’s friends and family are all sucked into the case which follows. She falls for one of the suspects who has lost his wife. This new lover later meets a carbon copy of this missing spouse leaves and then Alina for this new woman. Meanwhile, her father becomes disabled and retires and her colleague’s wife is slaughtered by the killer…and so on. Throughout it all a string of near watertight suspects needs to be discarded as so many false leads.

Select line up.

Ekaterina Vilkova, the 38-year-old actress from Nizhny Novgorod, made her name as the Dreamboat Girlfriend in the frothy Boy’s Own fantasy adventure Black Lightning (Chornaya Molniya, 2009). Ten years on Vilkova seems to have gained gravitas, being more striking than pretty and with an ability to suggest shifts of emotion with almost imperceptible alterations to her face.

The brooding 49-year-old from Krasnoyarsk, Kirill Safonov, takes the part of Alina’s new love interest whereas the Ukrainian born 34-year-old Alexander Gorbatov is his would-be paramour. The distinctive craggy looks of one Igor Kriphunov (best known as a permanent fixture in Svyatoslav Podgaevsky’s horror movie cycle) also appear.

One of my favourite actors, Alexander Yatso shows up for the sequel and he more or less reprises the role he portrayed in Akademia – a criminal psychologist.

A special call out should go to the man who played Alina’s father – Sergei Puskepalis. I remember this chunky actor for his role as the severe and stony-faced military officer in the disaster film Ledokol (Ice Breaker) from 2016. Alas, in an off -screen disaster this talented screen presence passed away in September of this year following a road accident in his home town of Yaroslavl.

R.I.P Sergei Puskepalis, 15th April 1966 -20th September 2022 [People’s. RU]

Son of the strangler.

Cold Shores: The Return catches up with the same cluster of characters three years on. Now, however, another depraved maniac is leaving a trail of female corpses in the snow in what appears to be a copycat of the previous case. Nevinsky has moved on to being a psychologist but her association (and notoriety) in connection with the earlier case brings her back into the fold of police investigation.

D.V.D cover of *Cold Shores: The Return*. [Kinopoisk.RU]

This time she has to contend with the cynical prying eyes of a popular blogger. She has a demanding teenage son who composes electronic dance music and has fallen out of love with her returned husband… and much else besides. Again, the narrative teases us with an identity parade of credible culprits. Then an ingenious rationale is given for the least expected one being the actual criminal.

Deluxe.

It might seem that the Cold Shores franchise (if we can already call it that) represents a standard issue post -Scandinoir Whodunit thriller in a market already saturated with this subgenre. Yet from the opening montage of the misty ice encrusted roads and bridges of Rybinsk-cum-Ozersk and the corresponding ruminating score by Vladimir Mayevsky and Mikhail Khimakov, the viewer senses something superlative is on the way.

The tale, told via the point of view of a number of characters, has enough of a measured pacing so as to allow the script to breathe and the characters to unfold. Attention has been paid to detail. For example, one of the investigators has the stimming habit of opening and closing a cigarette lighter. All this and the eerie mood music, the borderline exotic location and the spaghetti junction of twists and cliff hangers leads us to overlook any contrivances of the plot.

Just another crime thriller? [Kinopoisk.RU]

The U.S.P here is domestic melodrama (of the kind that Star Media does so well) spliced with a psychological thriller: a Dostoevsky tale told in a Hitchcockian style and set in an up-to-the -minute world of ever vibrating mobile phones.

Scandinavian or not?

The producers of Cold Shores have taken copious notes from the Scandinavian noir rulebook. One: get a lead who is a glamorous but relatable young woman. Two: plonk her in an overlooked but photogenic city. Three: surround her with a cast of tried and trusted character actors. Three: pile on the revelations and unmasking. Then throughout it all assume that the audience possesses some intelligence. It works, for sure.

Where they have differed from this template is also the very way this show can be marked out as Russian. It lies in the lack of any kind of sociopolitical slant. Unlike Trom (Denmark/Faroe Islands, 2022)or The Bridge (Denmark/Sweden, 2011) and, in particular, Henning Mankell’s Wallander (Sweden, 2005 – 2010)there can be seen no tilt at overarching corporate power – and this in a drama set in city notable for its secretive involvement in nuclear weapons production! Instead we get a family melodrama – complete with aspirational interiors – glorified as a suspenser.

Unlike so much of contemporary Russian small screen fare though, Cold Shores does not fall back on sidearm and shoot out porn to keep up the interest. Also the bleakness of its world view is much redeemed by the sense throughout that all the flawed characters really need each other.

REVERSAL

The Day my Dream of a Modern Russia Died.

So, I am back again, despite lack of popular demand and with a post that I never wanted to write.

It seems appropriate that the first warning of the catastrophe that was to come came out of the mouth of a xenophobic court jester – one Zhirinovsky. It was sometime in the winter of the previous year when he said something about Russia becoming great again and something about war, and this would start around the 22^nd February. The ravings of a moribund loon.

Then in the January of this year American military intelligence were often being quoted in the Western press about an imminent invasion of the Ukraine.

It was easy to shrug this off as panic porn. We had become weary of this since the pandemic years.

Then on February the 24^th came the headline news: Russian soldiers and tanks were barging in to a neighboring Slavic sovereign territory – and not just to safeguard Donbass but were heading to Kyiv.

Many Russians (let alone expats) have since insisted that their home country crossed the rubicon on this date and became a different country.

For myself, it felt as though all the background noise of Russian life from the past decade – the national exceptionalism and autocratic authoritarianism – which I had been polite enough to overlook, had all of sudden become the foreground. We had entered Sorokin’s The Day of the Oprichnik.

As Russia ranged itself against the West despite all the all too obvious repercussions, a numbness set in across the land. The day after the news everyday small talk became impossible. In the days that followed people scarcely talked about the new war – and if they did it would be to claim, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that it would be a short one.

I spent every morning unwilling to get out of bed, scrolling through as many news channels as I could find, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, hoping against hope for some kind of negotiated settlement.

All around us dark rumours swirled like whirlwind ready to suck us in: soon it would be impossible to cross all land borders as martial law would be imposed and the internet would only function within Russia.

These never happened but, then again, many flights out of Russia were no longer available, access to sites such as Facebook became restricted and frightening new rulings were passed making any kind of public discussion of what was happening well-nigh impossible. You could be caged for up to 15 years for even mentioning the war – as opposed to the `Special Military Operation`.

Novoya Gazeta, was subject to threats and had to leave the country. Moscow Ti mes – the voice of liberal America in Russia – took the precaution of making themselves scarce in advance. Radio Doszhd was closed down and Meduza could only be accessed with a VPN. This was not the `developing,` if `managed`, democracy that I had signed up for. Had I been backing a losing horse for the last fifteen years?

With that came the fast forwarding of one unfortunate facet of Russian reality: the brain drain. Many young Russian professionals decamped to nearby C.I.S countries and many of my immigrant colleagues got onto the net and booked journeys out by the nearest exit and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Mute witness.

I did not join them. I had already invested too much to jettison it all. Meanwhile, I learnt about my own limitations – that I lacked the guts to join in the sporadic protests that began to appear on streets near me. As for this blog, I could think of nothing reasonable to say that would not now be actionable.

I became like any ordinary Russian citizens, keeping my views to myself. Reassuring myself that I had not panicked like so many acquaintances of mine, I doubled down on `Russianness`: I visited the Bolshoi theatre a few times and took in some ballet and I got around to finishing Brothers Karamazov.

But something felt wrong.

Violation.

Now that my gag is off, I can tell you what I think about this `Special Military Operation`. The invasion of the Ukraine represents an arrogant violation of international law. It is an act of imperialism and there is nothing that the people of the Ukraine have done to bring it on.

The grim ordeals of the Ukrainian people – the shelling of peaceful cities, millions of people being made homeless and the executions – have been well documented. Yet it is not only Ukrainians who have been exposed to needless tragedy. If the BBC is to be believed then 3, 052 Russian soldiers had been slaughtered as of May 31^st of this year (and this number only includes those whose full names could be confirmed).

Then there has been the inevitable blowback against Russian `soft power` – the very thing that this blog was so bound up with. Tchaikovsky has been removed from the playlists of some Western orchestras, Dostoevsky airbrushed out of the reading lists of certain universities, even the Crufts international dog show disallowed Russian dog breeds and an American mustard museum took out it’d display of Russian mustard. The most egregious aspect of these cancellations is the fact that that from Malevich to Gogol to Vera Brezhneva -many `Russians` are Ukrainians or have Ukrainian ancestry. Trying to separate Russian and Ukrainian cultures is akin to trying to remove the egg yolk from a cake mix. As the French actor, and now Russian citizen, Gerard Depardieu said: `This is a fratricidal war`.

Furthermore, now that the West seems hell bent on supporting one side in this civil war, it is one where there is an all too real possibility that weapons of mass destruction may be flung around. We have entered The Day of the Oprichnik and may well also end up in the world of Metro 2032 and The Slynx as well.

There seems to be two ways that we can wake up from this nightmare. One is for one side to vanquish the other. There are many reasons why the world should not want this outcome.

The other way out is for a negotiated settlement and one which would lead to a long-term ceasefire and a diplomatic peace agreement. This would need a lot of earnestness and grown up statecraft to happen.

I hope and pray for this outcome though and also grieve the many opportunities for such an agreement that have already been chucked away.

Provocations.

My condemnation of the actions of the Kremlin does not mean that I am unaware of the role of the Western military machine in this global disaster too.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was set up as a response to the perceived threat of the Eastern Bloc back in the late forties. The latter formed the Warsaw Pact as a countermeasure. NATO has now 30 member states under its wing and the Warsaw Pact zero. In 1991 as the Soviet Union folded, and with it the Warsaw Pact, not only did NATO fail to soften its approach, it began to push its boundaries out further to the East, covering an eventual 800 miles.

In March 1999 Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic became a part of this aggressive military bloc.

Then in 2004 Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Estonia followed suit. (Estonia being only 200 kilometres from Sant Petersburg).

Albania and Croatia joined up in 2019 as had Montenegro in 2017. But it didn’t end there: NATO sent troops to Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.

In 2010 NATO had begun speaking of a `new strategic concept` and this included in its remit `out of area activity`. Ignoring the United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, around 150 US B61 nuclear bombs had been positioned around Europe by 2012.

The warnings of august diplomats such as Henry Kissinger that this behavior would only lead to further tensions went unheeded.

This looks more and more like a proxy war in which Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are used as cannon fodder in the long-standing desire for NATO to ensure that Russia is humiliated.

Green ribbons.

In the light of all that, we can be grateful that not all Russians have become zombified by `Uncle Vova’s` megaphone which is the state media and press which lays out a diet of bloodthirsty and rash militarism.

As well as the brave rallies which have resulted in sweeping arrests, some of Russia’s Great and Good have made some unexpected contributions. The Georgian heartthrob-crooner Valery Meladze got in early to speak out against the war. He was rewarded by some of his shows getting withdrawn.

Popular singer Valerie Meladze [MA Regnum]

On similar lines the bow-tied chat show host Ivan Urgant (think Jonathan Ross) let his feelings be known on this. He too has been taken off air in disputed circumstances and there are unconfirmed rumours that he has since fled to Israel on a permanent basis.

Popular TV chat show host Ivan Urgant [Armur Info]

Of the political parties, the disenfranchised liberal club which is Yabloko could be relied on to critique this foolish vainglory. However, there are also reports that the much more loyalist Russian Communist Party has experienced some tumult as its younger members question the official narrative and even talk of `Imperialism`.

In the rock world, there are some acts that we would expect to nail their anti-war colours to the mast and these include D.D.T, Zemfira and, of course, Lumen. Others have simply gone quiet. The hip-hop genre has acquitted itself quite well with one of its prominent exponents – Oxxxymoron becoming something of a tribune for anti-war sentiment.

Many gestures by `ordinary people` have been small but significant. Someone in my local area of VDNKH (Moscow) went around putting up photographs on walls showing scenes of ruined Ukrainian cities after shelling operations. A man in St Petersburg a man called Alexey Lakhov has been filing complaints with various government agencies for their use of `Z! symbols in public places – and has put many of them on the defensive.

New symbols of resistance have gone viral after being promoted by the internet savvy young. Green ribbons have been tied around the bannisters of public buildings and a `new Russian flag` has gained some traction. This consists of the colours `White-Azure-White` and represents an alternative peace-loving Russia.

Evacuation.

For the last four months I have kept the company of people who have buried themselves deep into their daily routines, their work, their families, in hobbies, in food and drink, in books and films and declined to engage with the blood that is spilled in their name on their doorstep. We were revelers on the decks of the Titanic.

I still cherished my life in Russia and could with ease have carried on living the way I was there. What nagged at me was that I was unable to either freely speak my mind in any public arena, let alone this blog, with impunity. Freedom of speech became a concrete issue for me.

So, after investing a lot of my rubles in dentistry and packing the rest away in a portable safe I joined a colleague in taking a fast train to Saint Petersburg. There we whiled a few days away before catching an overnight coach to the small and charming city of Estonia. From there I got a Flight to London Heathrow with no idea of what lay in front of me on the other end, and arrived there in June.

We took our leave without interference from any of the guards who stopped our coach numerous times en route. The Ukrainians and Russians who were with us were not so lucky.

I wish to return to Russia as soon as it is feasible to do so. Meanwhile, the show is not over. I have internet access, some Russian contacts and a backlog of experiences still to draw on.

Lead image: Floridagoodfriday.com

TOTAL ABANDON.

My first live encounter with Altpop/rockers TOTAL/CHERKUNOVA in Moscow’s relocated Mumy Troll Music Bar.

TOTAL/CHERKUNOVA, a pop rock sensation who sent up a flare at the beginning of this millennium, have been sprinkling Russia with soulful songs for two decades now, but are not yet ready for the anniversary gig routine.

At first known only as TOTAL (the addition to their moniker began last year), the band represent another brainchild of the ever-fertile composer and music manager Maxim Fedeev (who can also claim Linda and Yulia Sachayevo as amongst his discoveries).

Marina Cherkunova is his cousin and they both emerged from Kurgan, the `capital of the Trans – Urals` in Southern Russia where they each received a musical education. At the age of thirty Mariana became the lead singer of the new band.

TOTAL’s idiosyncratic trip-hop influenced alt pop-rock sound – and corresponding urban shaven haired image – found a ready audience and with it came a popular studio album and a string of high-profile festival appearances. Proud Russian magazine columnists likened them to the overseas Guano Apes and Skunk Anansie.

They came my way in around 2007 in the form of their second album TOTAL2: Moye Mir (`My World`). Injected with real feeling and with not a dud track on it, the band climbed high in my hierarchy of affections. (It helped too that that Cherkunova both has a role in and provides some of the music for, one of my favorite recent Russian films – Lost Island ( 2019) ). )

I had not, however, managed to catch them live before.

Altered abode.

There was not much notice about TOTAL CHERNUKOVA’s show on January 14^th: I only got wind of it at the last moment.

It was to be at the Mumy Troll music bar. But wait…didn’t that place close during the lockdown?

It turned out that the venue had teleported to the less salubrious but more populous environs of Novy Arbat.

The new Mumy Toll – as much as it strains to keep up the appearance of continuity (with all the nautical bric a brac) – is more commodious and feels somehow seedier and more `street`. The security is till as stiff as ever. No, I couldn’t take my rucksack in. The bar too remains as sluggish in its service. I only managed to get in two German beers all evening, being forever walled behind higher priority parties of cocktail sippers.

The establishment finds itself torn between the different demands of its demographics. There are those who come to in groups partake of the seafood at tables, caring not a whit what band may be playing. Then there are those to whom the place is a nightclub and are there to dance after the band has packed up. Then – oh, excuse us -there are the actual music fans who have, sort of, come to see a live band in a live music venue.

Band update.

The latter congregates bit by bit near the stage. Twenty to thirty somethings for the most part, they seem about two thirds female and a collision between glam girls and specky hipsters.

The first ripple of excitement comes when Anastasia Cherkunova – Mariana’s daughter and now director of the operation – comes on stage to deliver the water bottles and tape down the playlists.

The enter TOTOAL/CHERKUNOVA in their 2022 incarnation. This is a four piece with some new blood. The youthful Ilya Andrus supplies the guitar, Konstantin Mikyukov the DJ on the turntables, with the percussion being meted out by the chunky shade-wearing Stanislav Aksyonov .( They seem to manage to do without a bassist). In baggy jeans and floppy headgear, they exude a Nineties aesthetic.

Marina herself spots cropped peroxide-blonde hair in place of her more familiar bald pate (and looks better for it, if you ask me). Otherwise she combines knee length black dress with sturdy Gothic type boots.

Firebird.

Throughout their regulation two-hour set, this quartet guide us all their most loved tunes -`Hits the Eyes, Sparks, Karamasutra...with much upbeat banter between the songs from Marina. The fans, made somnolent by the January slush begin to thaw out and to jump and sway and to cheer and sing.

Even the attentions of security as they make sure we all keep are masks on at all times (compensating, no doubt, for a lack of QR code entry requirement) cannot dampen the conviviality.

What functions as the dynamo behind the whole experience is Maria Chernukova herself. I have not seen someone work so much at a performance since seeing Julia Volkova at the previous Mumy Troll some years ago. Embodying the joys and angst of life she puts in a writhing, impassioned full bodied, erotic performance like some sort of female Mick Jagger.

That she functions as an unacknowledged icon is evidenced by the excess of raised cameras all around me the whole time.

Urban folk.

The musicians augment the operatic delivery with some tongue-in-cheek `rockist` stadium gestures such as dragged out finales to songs with sections of drum and guitar solos.

TOTAL/CHERKUNOVA can boast one rather effective trick and it consists of clothing power pop ballads in a more urban, modern trip-hop stylistic.

They have a lot to live up to this night. I am seeing one of my most cherished acts for the first time and it is my first gig of the new year too.

They do not disappoint.

SPACE CORN: STAR MIND reviewed.

Russia’s much awaited Space Adventure film arrives at last. But haven’t we seen it all somewhere before?

STAR MIND (Syesdni Razoom) had been in the offing for half a decade before it made it into the Russian cinemas on January 6^th this year, doing so amidst precious little in the way of public poster campaigns or journalistic coverage (which may account for my seeing it in an almost empty cinema hall).

STAR MIND constitutes a 98-minute-long `adventure fantasy` certified at 12^+.Whilst its trailers seem to promise a horror, it would be more accurate to view it as pure (`hard`) science fiction laced with some thriller and action elements.

R.D Studios, who focus on the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres and who brought us Abigail (2019) are behind it.

The 38-year-old man with the megaphone Vyacheslav Lisnevsky, who worked on the fantasy drama Eclipse from 2017 here directs a young cast of relative unknowns.

The main protagonist, Doctor Steve Ross, is played by Egor Koreshkov. Russian television viewers will know him for his role in the series Eighties this year and he stars in the much-anticipated future world drama We due out this year. Alena Konstantinova supplies the love interest. Other players include Dmitry Frid, Alexander Kuznetsov (who sadly died before this film was released) and – it is interesting to see – a `woman of colour` in the form of Liza Martinez.

The picture, shot in the more futuristic areas of Moscow and in Charyn Canyon in Kazakhstan, represents something of a test case. We already know that Russia has the capability to roll out some credible science-fiction blockbusters because of the precedents of Inhabited Island (1 and 2) and Invasion (2020). STAR MIND however, consists of an off-world space adventure requiring even more lavish visual effects. Can Russian cinema meet this challenge?

Interrupted Quest.

The film opens a decade or so hence with the Earth in the grip of an ecological virus which takes a malign toll on the biosphere leading to plants and animals perishing and our planet becoming ever more uninhabitable.

In the midst of this, however, strange artefacts get discovered in caves around the world. These take the form of orbs and hail from we know not where. Doctor Ross is the man who learns how to activate them. It appears that they function as `seeders` and are able to make planets with oxygen and water even more able to cradle new life.

It is he who sets up Project Gemini. The mission of this is to seek out Earth’s twin planets and then terraform them using these orbs, thus finding a new habitat for humanity.

Egor Koreshkov as Doctor Steven Ross [Kinofilmpro.ru]

A team of men – and one Afro-Caribbean woman -and he take a shuttle through an intergalactic wormhole set for just such a planet.

Meanwhile, via flashbacks, we learn that the good doctor has a complicated relationship with a woman back on Earth who is pregnant by him (a romantic subplot which will go on to gain significance).

The ship carries them off course and they arrive at a planet they had not planned to – which nevertheless seems to have the right credentials for terraforming. All the while, a slimy critter has been a stowaway with them, hiding in the orb that they had taken on-board with them (Because – because…whatever). This tentacled monster is now at loose in the ship, picking off the crew, and with its own plans for the new planetary home….

We can see that this storyline is not the product of a lengthy brainstorming lunch. In fact, it is a stitching together of Interstellar (2014) and the Alien franchise (from 1979). The scriptwriters have made some attempts to put their own stamp on things. The life-spreading orbs are a fresh creation and there is a twist concerning the monster: it is a robot.

Dejavu.

The iconography of STAR MIND seems all rather familiar. We have ship with chunky steel doorways and crepuscular interiors with plenty of brightly lit consoles, and a cast of uniformed young men -and one black woman (who is given to running about in her underwear – Ripley style). The new planet too is all craggy and rocky in its terrain.

The technology on show seems like an odd clash of the current and the fantastical. The crew’s spaceship is a shuttle much like the ones employed by NASA in the present day and it is blasted off in a rocket also like the ones we know and are used to. Later, however the ship enters an` interdimensional wormhole` type thing of a much more extravagant nature.

The most jarring aspect of the film is the fact that all the characters are known by Western names. All the signs and computer readouts are in English too. Even the inclusion of a black woman can be taken as an attempt to underscore the impression that this is an American crew rather than any move towards diversity.

K.D Studios seem to be leaving nothing to chance: they are casting their net for the widest demographic which means the Anglosphere and having a 12+ certificate.

The problem here is that all the production team’s grey matter seems to have been expended on the – quite striking – visual impact of the film but at the expense of the plot and characterization. It is like an ornate chocolate box housing mediocre chocolate.

Popcorny.

That being said STAR MIND does retain some charms. Taken as a creature-feature it faces stiff competition from its compatriots in the form of Kola Superdeep (2020) and Sputnik (2020) and cannot even begin to compete. It does, nevertheless, feature some tense sequences: the frozen body of one of the crew slams into the window of their craft, the monster punches its way through the reinforced steel doorways and so on.

Also, while the ideas in the film may be second-hand, these ideas are interesting and do inform the events in the film.

STAR MIND may not be the epic that it promised to be. It is more of a popcorn-friendly B-movie, but is none the worse for that. There is even something endearing in its desperation to please its demographic. I am reminded more of the film Life (2017) more than anything else.

The Russian online feedback to its debut seems divided. Some claim to be duly impressed by the professionalism of its production values. They are in the minority however. There are much more couch critics who sneer at the film’s copycat nature.

Perhaps we should not worry too much. STAR MIND has demonstrated that the Russian film industry can muster up a respectable space adventure to match anything of the kind from Hollywood. Next time they just need to make sure that everyone knows that it is Russian!

The Western title will be PROJECT GEMINI [Kinopoisk.Ru]

Lead image:Datavyhoda.ru

GHOST SHIP: premier hard rock exponents CHORNY OBELISK at Izvestia Hall last year were SO last year.

I thought it would be good to check out a new venue for a change. Izvestia Hall is located in the former building of the publishing and print plant of the first Soviet newspaper – Izvestia – no less.

The publishers of this, after six years since starting in 1918, needed a new headquarters for their flourishing concern. In 1924 architects were invited to compete for the honour of being the designer of such a new building. Urban planner Grigory Barkhin’s Constructivist number won the day and it began to be built a short time thereafter. Izvestia itself closed shop in 2011. The current building, now an all-purpose venue for all manner of social events, has been restored to something like its former Modernist glory by Ginsburg Architects headed by Alexey Ginsburg.

Such a renovated relic seems like fitting host for a band like CHORNY OBELISK. This act too has lost its original driving purpose: their charismatic lead singer and bassist, Anatoly Krupnov, died 25 years back at just 31, after forming the band in Moscow in 1986. The current assembly – a string and drum four piece combo lead by 54-year-old rock veteran Dmitry Borisenkov – represents a reboot undertaken in 1999 which continues to sail despite the loss of its captain, like some sort of ghost ship.

They are at least gifted with an evocative name – Black Obelisk (and extra points to them if this is a tribute to the German novelist Maria Remarque’s first novel) and overall have some thirteen studio albums in their name. Their main rivals on the same turf – Aria – are often called `the Russian Iron Maiden` and in the same way CHORNY OBELISK could be seen as (although it fails to do justice to the variety of their output) `the Russian Motorhead`.

Grand old men of Russian metal.[drive2.com]

This event was packaged as being a special 35-year anniversary. Just as, from this year Elizium’s and Lumen’s shows were anniversaries. (What does this tell us about the state of the contemporary Russian music scene?)

Mature set.

A crowd of about a thousand forty and fifty somethings filed in from a snow-bound Sunday on December 19^th last year to have their QR codes and vaccine status scrutinized. They seemed to be in groups of friends composed of husbands and wives and had not brought their children. I saw few people below their age except for one or two blue haired and dreadlocked students here to show their respects.

The entrance of the main attraction was drumrolled by a lit backstage legend announcing their 35^th year. Then a telescopic rifle sight seeking a target circled on the screen against a brick walled background. Bee Gees disco music played (I gather that this was some kind of established in-joke). The masses meanwhile chanted `Chor – ny Ob-El -isk!`

The band played onstage for around three hours and thrashed out quite a beef goulash of a sound for four people (albeit sometimes aided by pre-recorded keyboard additions). The fans, in high spirits, joined in with plenty of rhythmic clapping and `Hey-hey-hey`s.

Borisenkov, with a caul covering his bald pate, was a genial host but seemed more the musician than any kind of ring leading front man.

The bassist and backing vocalist, Daniil Zakharenkov – resembling a piratical Robbie Coltrane -tried to compensate by working hard to whip up a `rock and roll party` ambience by gurning at the audience and so on.

The axe wielder – and original band member – Mikhail Svetlov – by contrast seemed a little bored. After pointing to some individuals in the crowd with mock-familiarity, he lapsed into dead-eyed mode, looking like an economics lecturer worrying about the state of his car.

This being a birthday bash, some `unexpected` guests clambered onto the stage to help out. I recognised none of these stars but can tell you that one of them was a white-haired plump guy in all denim with a growly voice and another was a tall dark young man in some sort of uniform-like get up who resembled a sinister leader of some kind of neo-Nazi cult.

The band did showcase quite a spectrum of song styles. Of course, there was state-of-the-art Eighties style Metal but we also got some speed core punk as well as the inevitable sing-a-long ballads. They even dusted down some iconic golden oldies such as `Ya Ostanous` (`I will Stay`) from 1994. When the audience started getting showered by glitter bombs I decided to take my leave.

Tribute act.

It is hard not to feel that CHORNY OBELISK would have cut a more significant profile back in the mid-Eighties when Gorbachev had not been long in the Kremlin and they were offering something fresh and with a more characterful kingpin. They now appear to be going through the motions a bit even if they do still deliver some satisfying adrenaline friendly riffs.

I feel that Borisenkov’s standardized vocal contribution provides no substitute for Kuprinov’s Kilminster-like roar. Indeed, at times I felt myself wishing that I could switch off the singing the better to bask in the rock instrumentals.

All that said, in comparison with Aria, the Obelisks are the edgier and more authentic of the two bands.

TEARS OF A CLOWN: An iconoclastic revival of the British play LOOK BACK IN ANGER by Ermolova Theatre.

John Osborne’s classic is often seen as a play of dissent concerning class differences and religious hypocrisy. How would such a play fare in Russia’s stifled atmosphere?

For some it was Catcher in the Rye, for me it was Look Back in Anger. That is to say a piece of writing which captured us in our youth and never let us go.

In my case this seems quite hard to account for. The seventeen-year-old that caught a revival of the play on the radio one summer was not working-class, nor a jazz fan, was not married nor in love and – at that time! – was not living in a flat in the Midlands.

It was the play’s double whammy of tone and eloquence that cut through.

Against all odds.

Look Back In Anger constitutes the third stage play by a 27 year old London touring actor called John Osborne. It was a domestic melodrama and the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square took it on in 1956 whereupon it was met with a polite disavowal – that is until one Kenneth Tynan, an influential critic from The Observer newspaper penned an enthused description of it as a generation defining piece. Then a TV showing of some of it followed and a new audience flooded in to see the whole thing. The play has been viewed as representing a stylistic trendsetter – towards greater contemporary realism and outspokenness on certain issues ever since. The play even made it to Moscow a year later. The role of Jimmy Porter – the so called `Angry Young Man` – has since become a popular script used for auditions for aspiring young male thespians.

So how would a Russian theatre of the twenty twenties serve up this hoary old classic to a Russian theatregoer?

The great adaptors.

A visible presence on Tverskaya street these last several years, Ermolova theatre was set up in 1933 and was named after the revered actress Maria Nikolaeva Ermolova (1853 – 1928). Today, the role of artistic director is filled by Oleg Menshikov (the military father in the films Attraction and Invasion). Under his auspices the company seems to be pushing at the boundaries somewhat. At the time of writing they are showing a rendering of Glukhovsky’s Text and also something called Russian Psycho which is not from the film of the same name but a tribute to Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. Indeed, some of their reworkings of established drama standards have discomfited audiences and critics alike – and Oglyanis Vo Gneve (Look Back In Anger) is nothing if not an established drama standard.

Nothing is sacred.

The clearest rupture with the original play is the defiance of naturalism. With its dinghy one room flat and above all, its ironing board, Look Back In Anger brought the punch of realism to an audience that had grown accustomed to mannered performances which wee at several removes from the worlds they lived in themselves.

In this revival, nevertheless, we discover the players in a rather commodious and stylish abode. There are wall lamps fixed to the walls and what can only be called French windows at the back of the stage (those emblems of pre-`Kitchen sink` theatre!) Old black and white antique looking pictures are festooned around the place and there are cushions on the floor. This is no bedsit in a Midlands town (although it might serve as a symbolic comment on the attachment to an Edwardian past that bedevils Jimmy).

Then – in a nod to Osborne’s subsequent play The Entertainer – the action gets interrupted by the arrival onstage of a clown- costumed Jazz troupe who seem to comment on the proceedings with their songs. This theatre of the Absurd-cum-circus element represents a thoroughgoing new realization of the play.

Misfit.

Resplendent in bright yellow socks, Andrei Martinev, who plays Jimmy Porter portrays him as very much the romantic-poetic archetype (his mannerisms put me in mind of the young Anthony Andrews). It was difficult to see this oddball adolescent as any kind of generational spokesman, however, still less imagine him running a sweet stall. His loyal sidekick Cliff Lewis – played by Makar Karyagin -is chunky, with blonde-haired clean-living looks that together with his braces make him look like a preppy young American more than a Welsh scruff. He spends a lot of time plucking guitar strings and bursting into song.

Not only is this version of the play vaudevillian in this way but it also seemed to be afflicted with ADHD! The players always had to be doing something as they spoke – unpacking something, fiddling with something – the script was never enough. There was also a fair bit of distracting drumming on tables with it all.

Stuck with the essentials.

What the production remained faithful to was the bare bones of the plot. Jimmy is a malcontent who is married to Alison (Polina Sinilnikova) , a woman from a higher class background than himself (this providing material for him to taunt her with) and Cliff is the more straightforward Welsh working-class friend who looks on as their marriage seems to teeter on the edge.

Enter into this `menagerie` Alison’s actress friend, the more dynamic Helena, come to stay for a week. Regarding her as a `natural enemy` Jimmy clashes with her, but not before she has arranged for his wife (who we learn earler is pregnant) to flee the scene.

Jimmy and Helena, in the classic attraction of opposites, fall into each other’s arms leaving a dismayed Cliff to also later vacate the household. All seems blissful, until the return of Alison, minus the baby….

All of that was there but the dialogue had been shuffled around and some scenes seemed to have been hollowed out: Cliff nursing Alison after she has burnt her arm on the iron, Jimmy shouting at the church bells and the final reconciliation scene between Jimmy and Alison.

It was disconcerting to find that Jimmy and Alison’s game of bears and squirrels – the very thing that keeps their relationship alive in tense – moments had gone. So had Jimmy’s pipe smoking (although we do see a cheeky reference to it when Alison momentarily has one in her mouth). Most of all, the visit from Alison’s father – Colonel Redfern -had been cut, leaving no one to counterpoint all the bohemian chaos.

The stand off between Jimmy and Helena however not only remained but had been placed at the centre of this piece and was played to dramatic perfection. Osbone gained a reputation as a `misogynist`, but the fact remains that he wrote some great roles for women and Helena Charles is one of them. Veronkia Safonova projected a credible take on her as a statuesque, Amazonian Alpha-girl and it was not difficult to envisage how even a despiser of phonies like Jimmy could succumb to her charms.

Overall, this production made the play less like a one-man show than more faithful versions of Look Back In Anger have seemed.

What does it mean here?

The stress on this play was somewhat on the `affairs of the hearts` end of things and it was all viewed through a veil of sadness and tears. What of the sociopolitical undercurrent that made the play notorious? What would a – say – manager from Yugo Zapadnaya – make of the depiction of life in a Midlands town in the Fifties? Or of the subtle, but all too real, distinctions between Working and middle-class culture? Or of Cliff’s Welshness? Or of the mention of Britain’s former imperial role in India?

All of this would be somewhat hard to translate into Modern Muscovite but what would not be lost on a contemporary Russian is the ethos of anticlericalism and antimilitarism that runs through this play.

Likewise, as a man born out of his time and unable to find anything the present scene to fire up his ideals, Jimmy Porter could be viewed as a Superfluous Man, if there ever were one. I am not so sure if anything of this came out in this production though.

Overcooked.

The acting was strenuous but the overall aesthetic was camp, without being effete. Osborne himself might even have approved. However, the `anything-goes` approach to the staging left us with something cluttered and frenetic, with the cabaret aspects of it detracting from the theatrical tension. Sound-wise, there seemed to be too many scores vying for our attention: Jazz, chanson and modern classical.

Osborne’s plays often seem to ruffle people’s feathers. These spectators left bemused and maybe a little dazed but not otherwise indignant. I did, however, notice a lack of laughter (for this is a funny play, for most British people). It might be telling that the only appreciative chuckle came when a theatrical joke was made about passing Lady Bracknell the cucumber sandwiches.

For myself I was just as unsettled as when I watched a play calling itself A Clockwork Orange a few years back. Their production set my mind into gear, however, and I am still processing it all.

Lead image: Ermolva.ru

THE INTRIGUER, THE MINDBLOWER AND THE ROMANCER: A Look Back at Three Soviet period Science fiction writers

Leaving aside the translated works of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and, to a lesser extent, those of Alexander Belyaev, the science fictioneers of Soviet period Russia are not much trumpeted in the Western world.

So what a pleasant thrill it gave me to chance upon, in an expat bookstore, three compendiums of translated science fiction stories by authors new to myself and from that period.

Thank you Raduga.

From their base in Zubotsky Boulevard in the Park Kultury region of Moscow, Raduga (`Rainbow`) Publishers began making available foreign language imprints from their inception in 1931 up until the end of the Soviet Union. These publications included children’s books, language guides, photographic albums and popular fiction. As a part of a series called `Adventure & Fantasy`, Raduga brought some representative science fiction authors to the Anglophone world in the era when glasnost and perestroika where being spoken of in the Kremlin.

A futuristic doppelganger tale.

Vladimir Mihanovsky’s The Doubles was first published by Progress Publishers in 1981 but Raduga bought the story six years later when the Ukranian writer was 56 years of age. By this time Mikhanovsky had been a teacher of Maths and Physics at Kharkov University and penned a few tales speculating on humanity’s relationship with robotic technologies.

The intriguer: Vladimir Mikhanoivsky [esu.com.va]

Mikhanovsky’s stories – there are four in this collection -take place in an urbanized future that appears to be somewhere in America (`the Rockies` get a mention in one story). Interplanetary travel is a part of daily life (but not integral to these tales), domestic robots grace every home and the cities are crisscrossed with moving walkways. The Land of Informa is the exception, being a charming Wellsian tale of a man stumbling on an alternate world near a railway station outside of Moscow. The Violet is a sometimes zany detective tale set in the aforementioned future world (indeed the author would later devote himself entirely to the detective genre).

The title story – The Doubles – seems to have as its title a play on Dostoevsky’s tale The Double (1846) – the quintessential doppelganger story. In it we meet Newmore, an obsessive and gifted scientific researcher who, very much like Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll, dreams of isolating the more virtuous side of man’s psyche away from his baser part. He employs the latest in particle physics to do so and creates a sort of ethereal anti-human entity (which he calls `Alva`) which has the capacity to absorb the worst of a human being and turn into their negative doppelganger in the process. However, the original person and their Alva must never meet as this will result in mutually assured destruction in the form of an explosion – yet the Alva is drawn by magnetism to seek out it’s opposite and so needs must be avoided at all costs.

Despite these drawbacks, Newmore finds an all too willing guinea pig. Arben is a man desperate to rid himself of the guilt and irascibility that has overruled his life so far.

Indeed, after Newmore’s procedure, Arben does gain a new life: he receives a new approval from his workmates, forgets his guilts, gets back with an old, now adoring, girlfriend, acquires a swish new automobile and so on. However, the Alva is always Out There, seeking him….

Soon he is begging Newmore to reverse the whole experiment, particularly as his double seems to be breaking the expected rules in its urge to meet him. With a heavy heart Newmore agrees, but will the Alva get to Arben first?

Mikhanovksy tells a fine up-tempo tale even if some of the dialogue (in translation at least) reads like something from a television soap opera. His writing – not all that `Russian` really – resembles an Asimov but with a more vivid appreciation of the pitfalls of technological development.

Signals from a doomed species.

The Odessa born Segei Snegov died at the age of 84 in 1994 after having become best known for his space opera extravaganza People as Gods which he tapped out between 1966 and 1977 delighting many fans in Eastern Europe who resonated with his galaxy spanning quasi-Biblical excursions.

The mindblower: Sergei Snegov [Yandex.Zen]

First appearing in Detskaya Literatura in 1977, Snegov’s addition to the `Adventure & Fantasy` series consists of twelve stories which revolve around Roy and Henry, two scientific investigators tasked with getting to the bottom of inexplicable events or unusual crimes involving technology.

They live in a future world not unlike Mikhaonovsky’s. We are not given a location but weather is controlled, we have interstellar travel, robots of course, and a hinted at world government. The means exist to record and project the thoughts and dreams of the human mind and this features in a great many of the stories.

In the title story Ambassador Without Credentials Roy’s job has become personal. He is investigating the mysterious crash onto Mars of a spaceship which was carrying Hemry, his brother who is now lying comatose in a hospital on Mars.

Events accelerate when it transpires that the catastrophe had defied the laws of physics. The crew were befuddled by receiving warning signals that had reached them at faster than light speeds (an impossibility). Meanwhile, in his coma Henry is dreaming about physical and mathematical concepts which are way beyond his own capabilities….

The plot, as brilliant as it is preposterous, goes on to encompass an imperiled civilisation trying to reach out by using pseudo-humans planted into Earth’s society and by moulding the dreams of performers who sell their own dreams for entertainment purposes. We also get an alien visitor masquerading as a monkey that feeds off electricity and the use of an invisibility suit.

The tone is upbeat, even jocular at times, yet it is a very homosocial world. There are no women in this story, not even there as objects of desire. Despite this Ambassador Without Credentials delivered one of the most fun reading experiences I have had for a long time whilst playing with such solemn themes as the nature of Good and Evil and personal responsibility in the face of cataclysm.

An archeologist’s Mediterranean mission.

The still living Yuri Medvedev, from Krasnoyarsk, is the youngest of the three and his reputation still precedes him. Type his name into Yandex.ru and you will encounter shadowy insinuations about this writer including him being a key player in the “defeat of Soviet science fiction` no less.

The romancer: Yuri Medvedev. [swarogfond.livejournal.com]

Such accusations, which he has rebuffed, seem to refer back to his time as the Editor of Molodiya Gvardira . He steered this publication in the direction of pan -Slavic nationalism and in so doing set himself up in opposition to such figures as Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

This was all some time ago and it is now difficult to sort out the facts from the gossip so – to the texts themselves!

The first and longest tale in The Chariot of Time (a collection introduced by the cosmonaut Vitaly Sevastyanov!) is called The Cup of Patience, a sort of science fantasy folk tale narrated by a young archeologist called Oleg Preobrazhensky.

In the Far East of the Soviet Union, Preobrazhensky had unearthed the dwelling and preserved body of a legendary princess called Snow Face. Later, however, his breakthrough discovery gets buried under the rubble of an avalanche triggered by an earthquake.

Later an imperious teacher of his sends him on an unexplained errand in Sicily, where most of the action will henceforth unfold. In Sicily a strange epidemic is underway and there is talk of UFO sightings and fires that seem to be caused by them. Nearby there resides an American military base. What part does this play in it all?

Preobrazhensky then meets up with Snow Face – except she is really the representative of an intergalactic community bent on safeguarding the Earth’s environment….

This itemization of the main plot elements does little to convey the experience of reading it. Medvedev seems to be a part of the Ray Bradbury school of science fiction which has a lot of poetic ruminations throughout. Stylish and sophisticated though his prose is, it is also high-falutin and over-romantic and I came close to returning the book to the shelf unfinished. The Cup of Patience does reach a kind of focused conclusion however, and it seems to be a simple `Yanks Go Home` one (and which had already dated by the time of the translation of this story in 1985).

A Challenge to Stereotypes.

Encountering Soviet Period culture can so often be something of an eyebrow raiser, failing, as it often does, to conform to our prejudices. The only writer here with a clear ideological axe to grind is Medvedev although even his brand of Pan-Slavism meets Green consciousness was not exactly the party line in the Eighties. As for Mikhanovsky and Snegov, they were very akin to their Western science fiction counterparts of their day. They even gave their protagonists Western sounding names.

Mikhanovsky, Vladimir The Doubles (Moscow: Rasduga Publishers, 1987) (Translators: Raisa Bobrova, Miriam Katz, Katherine Judelson).

Snegov, Sergei Ambassador Without Credentials (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1989) (Translated by Alex Miller).

Medvedev, Yuri The Chariot of Time (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1988) (Translated by Robert King).

PHANTOMS OF THE CRIMEA: REVIEW OF THE FILM `GUESTS`.

A routine paranormal drama tastefully delivered with pleasing locations and sets.

Like many less supported Russian cinema releases GUESTS was alloted a desultory run at the cinemas. I have only just caught up with it now in DVD form (which had to be ordered at that). 2019 – the year that GUESTS was put on the market already feels like a distant era. Then you could travel where you liked and mixing in groups was unproblematic (both things form the backbone of this film).

Part of a lineage.

GUESTS , a 16+ certificate 88 minute long film by Emotion Films, represents a formulaic ghost chiller of the young-people-in-an-abandoned -old-house type. The promotional poster boasts that the picture is from the same producers that brought us the chillers Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite and The Route is Built, both from 2016 .Indeed the names Georgy Malkov,Vladimir Polyskov and Danil Makhort all appear, among others, in the roll call of the producers of all these films.

Evgeny Abusov is a man you would not have predicted would have been behind the camera. Little would you know from this film that this director is better known for his comedies.

The leading role is taken by Angelina Stretchina, whose persona here is quite apart from the spunky dreadlocked tough girl she played in Queen of Spades2:Through the Looking Glass (released in the same year). The Dzhezkagan born 44 year old prolific actor Yuri Chursin brings class to the proceeding as the would -be romantic interest.

The screenplay was by Sergey Ageev who also worked on First Time (2017) a biopic concerning Alexei Leonev, the first man to space walk.

A special shout out should go to Alexandra Fatina, the photographer. She has provided the visual element to other ghost stories such as Envelope (2017) and here enriches this story with the special flavour of its location. Indeed the Black Sea coast location shots do much to impart a special character to what, on paper, seems a run-of-the-mill supernatural yarn.

Katya (Stretchina), who seems a rather timid, even frosty young woman, is working as a waitress in a cafe on the Crimean coast as the summer draws to an end. Her colleague introduces her to a new crowd. These are a gang of young hedonists whose idea of a good time is to find a property where they can lay on a private techno-rave, with one of their number being a professional DJ. Furthermore one of the men in the group takes an immediate interest in Katya.

The old dark house.

Rather against her own better judgement Katya directs their attention to an unoccupied old mansion on the coast that she knows of. (From a costume drama style prologue we know this to have been the lair of a local occultist back at the turn of the century). Soon the crew are partying in the property that they have squatted in, and trying not to think too much about the old textbooks about demonology that they have found about the place.

It is then that the long absent current owner bursts in on the scene. Andrei (Churshin) is a desperate man and he seems deranged enough for the men in the group to overtpower him and imprison him in the cellar. Then we learn that Katya had had an unconsummated tryst with this strange man when she had worked as a home-help at the mansion earlier. She begs them to release Andrei. Upon returning to the cellar, however they find that he has vanished….

Then the spirits of the house begin to make themselves known. A black ooze begins to disgorge from the walls. A phantom woman and satanic boy- child are seen. They have extendable talons and a tendency to hiss like angry cats.

Sedate.

The narrative pace is slow with many drawn out scenes. For example one long sequence just involves the youths poking around their new found prop erty. Jump scares are few and indeed even denied in scenes where you might expect one. Likewise there is no blood and guts. A young woman is impaled on a tree branch after being flung into the air by an angry spirit but we see very little. The most effective sequences are as low key as they are low tech: An unnoticed child stamds stock still in a doorway gazing in a baleful way at a room full of self-absorbed dancers.

Otherwise GUESTS constitutes a a cascade of spook paraphenalia: a seance, figures glimpsed in bathroom mirrors, people being levitated and so on. However, the real take-away from it all is the aesthetic appeal. We get stunning shots of the coast early on and then when we go indoors it’s all the muted browns and pastel green shades of an antique interior. Lovely.

Then Mark Dorbsky’s unobtruxive but brooding score reinforces the dreaminess of it all.

Here we get shown the Snapchat generation meeting their doom after kicking the hornets nest of a much older Crowleyesque set. Within that we get the usual kinds of tropes about obsessive love surviving death, the need for jusrice to be restored after so long and so on.

A shoulder shrug from compatriots.

What of the genertion this film is aimed at? Hating on their own domestic cinema is something of a Russian past-time so it comes as no surprise to find, for instance, someone calling herself `Kosmonaut Misha` on Otzovik.com, in a piece entitled `I’m sorry I saw this`:

There is an atmosphere, but it is an aymosphere of stupidity and absurdity

Yet some people appreciate these more subdued slow burners. GUESTS belongs to the same spectral category as the Spanish film The Others (2001). It might seem anodyne in comparison with the circus thrills on offer from other glitzier films but it works on its own terms. This is by no means a breakthrough film, but a stepping stone towards a cinema genre that Russia remains quite new to.

Lead image: Film.Ru

ON GOLDEN CLOUDS: ELIZIUM LIVE AT ADRENALINE STADIUM.

NIZHNY NOVGOROD’S LOCAL HEROES HAVE BEEN BLASTING OUT THEIR UPBEAT SOUND FOR OVER TWO DECADES. BUT WHAT ARE THEY SO HAPPY ABOUT?

So it is up the Green line to the north-west of Moscow to the Adrenaline Sradium, one of the live music venues to have come out of the other end of the Big Stop.

The hype for this event had only been an on-screen one: I saw no posters about it, but what hype it was! The event – billed as `Twenty Five Years in Space` was to be an Anniversary bash and was evoked with nostalgic fanfare:

`It seems like yesterday we were putting on plaid shirts and mohawks and the walls of the Nizny Novgorod `Manhatten club thudded together with any musicians we could…`

And so on. Yet despite this generational framing, the assembled masses lining up outside the club on 17th September prove a nondescript bunch in terms of style and of all and every age. I catch sight of one man who seems to be accompanied by what might be his septugenerian mother. Conversely, another mother in her forties accompanies her daughter – who looks perhaps not yet sixteen – to as far as the entrance to the show.

Another incongruous aspect to the set up is the fact that a vaccine passport( in the form of a QR code) proving that you had had the Sputnik V jab is demanded for the privelege of them taking your money to see them. (The band, or their management are, I suppose, entitled to make such stipulations if they want but my ferverent wish is that such schemes do not become viral throughput Moscow).

Power Pop Dance.

ELIZIUM first took to the stage in 1995 in the tourist town of Nizhny Novgorod on the river Volga. The bass player Dmitry Kuznetsov, who took up music after having taken two degrees, is the kingpin and together with the singer Alexander Telekhov forms the mothership of a band that is characterised by a revolving door of contributors coming and going.

The band, somewhat lionised in their local city, boast some ten albums and, for all the line up changes, a distinct sound. `’`Space rock` (as they sometimes style it) it is not – or at any rate not if this term puts you in mind of Hawkwind and the like. (The only cosmic part of their performance lays in the numinous electronic ambient introductory soundtrack as the band enters the sage). Nor, nowadays at least, could the sound be pigeonholed as `punk` or even `ska punk`: it is too polished for that. If pressed I would call it `Power Pop Dance music`.

Sporting a mohican doesn’t make you a punk.

Heads up all the way, they deal out big slabs of melodic sound held aloft by peppy rhythms and enthused vocals. They are a slice of cherry pie swimming in cream and perhaps with some smarties in it. Their very name, which they are weary of being asked about, is the Greek word for `bliss`.

Jamboree.

ELIZIUM comprise the usual string and drum set with two horns and a keyboardist, making them a seven piece plus backing girl singers and an occasional electric cello. With so much going on on the stage they do not add any dry ice or strobe lights or anything of that kind. They are of indeterminate age and favour skinny jeans, casual shirts and shades giving the proceedings a beach party ambience.

Doing some synchronised hopping from one foot to the other, they sustain an unstoppable dance machine for three hours or so. Some of the best performances are provided by the audience. In front of me a shapely peroxide blone bombshell girates about with her uber-chad boyfriend. It was what they had come for.

One of the band’s songs features a chorus which translated as `Golden Clouds` and this seems to pretty much encapsulate the carefree ethos which they are determined to put across.

This being a birthday do, there are guest stars too. Among those that I recognised are Lu Gevorkyan, the leade singer of LOUNA . She materialises, quite without preamble, looking chunkier than I had remembered, and her trademark roar seemed a little askew amidst all the froth. Likewise, isn’t that the dimunitive form of a pink haired version of SLOT’S Daria Stavrovich that I see before me?

ELIZIUM are self-conscious crowd pleasers and the devoted punters reward them for it. Even the brass section, it is refreshing to see, can bask in some of the kind of love more often given to guitar heroes. Searching my lexicon for a pithy word or two to pin them down I come up with `brassy` and `vaudevillian` and I think that about nails it as much as I can.

However, the brassy vaudevillianess is diluted a bit by the presence of several television camreras on and offstage. I sense that the quality of the musician’s playing has a detached feel about it, as though they are performing for on-screen posterity more than for us.

Without waitng fo the encore, I clamber out into the wide and dark boulevards outside feeling a bit out of sorts. The `golden clouds` may have been covid-free, but there was a kind of toxic positivity about them. I find myself sickening for some kind of confrontational bite – of the kind that a band like ICE3PEAK or, sometimes, PILOT can deliver. This seems vanishingly rare in the rock-pop world of Russian in the fourth term of Putin.

EASY TARGET: The dubious appeal of THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER.

DON’T BREATHE, the American horror thriller from five years back featured a crusty elder fighting back against youthful miscreants. The Russians get there first with VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER . Except that this is no horror movie, and the old guy is the hero!

I have hinted before that there exists a glut of gun wielding tough guy shows on Russian television. Every now and then something impressive shows up from this overcrowded market. COLD SHORES (out on Starmedia last year) – not, I admit a typical cops and robbers yarn – did boast some high production values and could have been summarised as `Russia-pulls-off Scandanavian noir`.

If you dig back a few decades,there could be some other contenders. THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER (1999) has been broadcas a few times on the TV 1000 Russian film channel of late. Despite my grave misgivings about it, it must be a tribute to its witchcraft that I had not intended to ever write about it, but find myself doing just that!

A product of the closing years of the tumultuous nineties, this film is no Bright Young Debut. The producer was Stanislav Govorukhin, a director best known for his iconic T.V seriesThe MEETING PLACE CANNOT BE CHANGED from 1979.

The leading role was filled by none other than Mikhail Ulyanov, a grand old man of stage and screen, who, among much else, was Dmitry Karamazov in the 1968 rendition of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.

Furthermore, the film is an adaptation of a novel by Victor Pronin, a leading doyen of crime fiction, called WOMEN ON WEDNESDAYS published four years earlier than the film.

For all these august connections,THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER can be pigeonholed in the Michael Winner-style Vigilantes Revenge crime subgenre that causes such righteous tut-tutting – and for sound reasons.

Yet AFISHA magazine (a hard copy culture review zine from 1999 to 2015) ranked it among a 100 major Russian motion pictures.

THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER details in its 95 minutes one septugenarian’s victory over some of the lawlessness of the early post-Soviet years. It is set amongst `ordinary people` in provincial Russia. (They filmed it in Kaluga, a town some 150 kilometres southwest of Moscow, now known for the Tsiolovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics).

Scenes from provincial life in THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER [Kininews.ru]

GRAMP’S REVENGE.

Ivan Afonin (Ulyanov) seems a respectable former railway worker and veteran who cares for his grand-daughter alone in a modest flat. Nearby, in the neighbourhood, live a trio of young `New Russians`. With well connected parents, these young men spend most of their time boozing and – on Wednesdays – paying for sex. They blast out rock music, drive fancy cars and one of them is a student of Structural Linguistics.

One summer’s Wednesday evening they find themselves without a female plaything and, from their balcony, catch sight of Ivan’s grandaughter in an alluring short skirt and high heels. Exuding a certain vivacious charm, one of them invites her to a `birthday party` and she goes upstairs to join them.

A gang rape ensues with all three involved. Ivan, on discovering the degradation visited on his kith and kin is devastated. He takes the usual route at first of calling the police.

The police response is rather brutal. They barge their way into the boy’s flat on a pretence of being neighbours then separate the boys and threaten them until one makes a confession.

What happens next is that the father of one of the youths shows up. He is a high-ranking policeman and, displeased as he is by his son, shuts down any further investigation.

`You’ve invaded our land` Ivan tells one functionary when he learns this. He then turns to the black market in search of a big enough gun. (`Look at what television is doing to old people these days` remarks one tradesman after turning him down). However, he finds an S.V.D rifle complete with viewfinder and an all inportant silencer – and people shady enough to be willing to sell it. When he gives it a trial run, he seems such a good shot that they compare him to someone from the Voroshilovsky regiment (A Second World War military unit with legendary marksmanship abilities).

On alternate Wednesdays he picks off the rapists one-by-one from the vantage point of a flat which the old man is looking after while the tenant is away – and which happens to be opposite the boy’s place.

The first young turk gets a bullet in the groin as he holds a bottle of champagne between his legs – and the event is assumed to be due to an exploding champagne bottle at first. He is thus castrated.

The second one is sitting in his car when it becomes an inferno owing to a shot at the petrol tank. The third one suffers a breakdown into insanity as he awaits his fate and shoots his own father – the very one who had stymied the case -in a state of paranoia.

All the while our gunman is posing as an enfeebled old duffer oblivious to the drama which he is creating. Furthermore, he attracts a Guardian Angel in the form of a sympathetic cop who stashes away the gun just before his senior colleagues come searching for it.

The vigilante rifleman is the unequivocal good-guy of this film. [recommend.ru]

Vengeance porn.

By all accounts Pronin’s novel featured a political dimension, with the shooter taking up arms on behalf of the `little people` and in opposition to the post-Yeltsin `New Russians`. This aspect is, for the most part, lost in this film. The title, as well as the promotional poster, foregrounds the old man as the Hero. His tormentors meanwhile, are rock music playing pantomime villains (if very well acted).

The violence too is a form of bloodthirsty poetic justice: for example, in the novel the first victim is shot in the leg, not the genitals.

Then there is the sexualisation of the female victim. We are treated to shots of her legs so that, before the distressing rape sequence, we feel somewhat titillated.

This is no Horror film then. Nor is it a Revenge Tragedy in the Jacobean tradition. Nor a call for us to ponder on how `violence begets violence` or somesuch issue. Ivan is set up as the clear Hero of the story and we are invited to relish in his cathartic act of disproportionate revenge.

22 year’s old and still popular to this day- but how much has this film contributed to a runaway gun culture in Russia? {prdisk.ru]

So it is no surprise that there are some who have treated this entertainment as though it were an instruction manual. For instance, In 2008, 57 year old Aleksander Mansurov was jailed for murder after he had shot two people, one of whom had allegedly raped his daughter, in a village near Rostov-On-Don. (Such tit-for-tat brutality may become more rare as gun control measures are being put in place following the school shooting that occured in Kazan back in May of this year).

THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER keeps you watching throughout and then stays with you. I, for one, feel sullied by the moral vacuum at the heart of it though.

Lead image: Vkontakt.