Film – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

TWO TRUE TALES OF ENTRAPMENT

Like metaphors for contemporary Russian life, two survival biopics from several years back are a fixture on Russian TV schedules.

LOST IN ICE.

First hitting Moscow’s screens in 2016 to coincide with America’s Deep Water Horizon, a dramatisation of the 2010 oil spill from an off shore drill, Ledokol (Ice-breaker) is a Russian disaster flick brought to us courtesy of the forty-something director Nikolay Khomeriki (who some cinema buffs will already know for the film 977). And this film, in its home country pulled, in a larger audience than Tom Cruise’s then latest (Jack Reacher 2) on its screening.

Filmed with the aid of a real life atomic icebreaker, the motion picture cost ten million U.S dollars and they shot it over a three and a half month period in such Arctic areas as Murmansk and Khibiny.

Giving overdue recognition to some forgotten naval icons, as well as lifting the lid on the obscure way of life of icebreaker crewmen, the movie takes as its inspiration the ill- fated voyage of the ship Mikhail Somov in 1985. On the way to supplying scientific bases in Antarctica, the ship ended up becalmed in packed ice for a perilous 133 days with 53 crewmembers aboard. `Soviet Research Ship in Antarctic Ice` – was the New York Times headline from June of that year.

In the film, the ship is re-christened Mikhail Gomorov. With its strengthened hull, ice-breaking design, and sheer power, this behemoth is one of the stars of story. The other star – fresh from his role in the sumptuous period drama The Duellist –is Pyotr Petrovich Fydorov.

With his wiry and dark good looks, however, he seems out of place (perhaps even miscast) as the captain of twenty or so bearded beefy, chunky sweater wearing crewmembers.

It is not long into the film before the villain of the piece emerges from the icy depths in the form of a monstrous iceberg. They are unable to negotiate their way round this and soon the crew find themselves becalmed in a sea of ice. Then follows a string of calamities. A rescue helicopter arrives with replacement staff and a new captain. This catches fire in the process of landing and leaves the new arrivals stranded on the ship together with those they were intended to take over from. As ice is somewhat static, much of the film’s drama arises from the crew becoming more and more mutinous towards this unpopular new presence.

Some suspenseful moments do appear, however, in this 12 Certificate movie. The first captain, on an on-foot expedition to get their bearings, plummets down an icy labyrinth. His only way to get help is to rely on a flare, but in the process he also upsets an angry walrus.

This is an almost all male story, and one in which (in contrast to most disaster movies) the fateful events occur from the film’s opening. To provide some human interest the makers have added a mischievous ginger dog to the mix. Two unconvincing female subplots have been shoehorned into the plot too. Back in St Petersburg, one crew member’s wife has to un undergo a caesarean to give birth, while the first captain’s wife is a fearless journalist who gets embroiled in their rescue on board another nuclear ice-breaker.

Eighties details abound: we see electric typewriters, puffball skirts, a reel-to-reel film projector (showing The Diamond Arm) and even a Rubrics Cube (which in fact has a role in the plot). Also giving it all a retro feel is the strings based orchestral score. That said, this is more than a jolly Soviet style film about camaraderie and resilience: when the crew indulge in a spot of communal folk singing, the replacement captain responds by smashing their acoustic guitar.

Whereas this year’s other major disaster movie – Ekipazh, an airplane disaster scenario – was glitzy and sensationalist and set its sights on the present day (and on an international market), Ledokol is all -Russian and grittily realistic and looks back, or be it with some ambivalence.

A telling sequence of the film comes right at the end. The rescued survivors are enjoying the sun with a barbecue on the deck of the ship. One of them holds aloft a copy of Pravda. Thumbing through the pages, they pass a picture of the newly inaugurated Gorbachev before they get to the account of their ordeal. Then they cheer for the captains – both of them. For the first time the stern replacement captain allows himself to smile. The music of Kino sounds. The credits roll.

LOST IN SPACE.

First time (Vremya Pervyh) , a well –publicised adventure was granted an extended run at many cinemas when released in 2017. Dmitry Kiselov, best known for lighter fare such as Black Lightning from fifteen years ago (a sort of new take on Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang), directed the film. It was released to coincide with Cosmonaut day – April 12^th. That day commemorates Gargarin’s birthday but this biopic takes as its subject a feat of almost equal importance: in 1965 the then 31-year-old Alexander Leonev conducted the first Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA).

Race to be the first.

Better known as a `space-walk`, the EVA involved Leonev taking leave his space capsule so that there was nothing between him and the vacuum of space except his spacesuit. This attempt lasted for 12 minutes and 9 seconds (longer, as we shall see, than was planned for). Leonev’s achievement paved the way for the American Moon landings effected five years later.

At that time, however, the Soviet Union were leaping ahead in the `Space race`. They had sent up the first satellite, put dogs into space, then the first man and woman in to orbit and even reached the Moon in the form of the probes Luna, Luna 2 and Lunakhod. This relentless need to stay ahead of the competition is brought out in this film, which opens with the deadline being set for 1965.

The prologue to this dramatic recreation is a childhood dream of Leonev’s: in a vision worthy of Ray Bradbury, we him see running through tall grass at night and releasing a cloud of fireflies which rise up into the starry summer sky. (The adult Leonev is played by Yevgeny Mironov a long-standing actor who made his name in a coming of age drama called `Love` in 1991. For this role he has to play someone about twenty years his junior).

Mishaps.

Things get harder edged after that. The Voshkod 2 mission has been earmarked for the task and the preparation for this it is all rather hurried along. Health and safety is not anyone’s biggest concern: a technician working on the ships design gets electrocuted to death.

That sets the trend for the flight itself: Leonev’s spacesuit becomes inflated on his space walk and so he cannot re-enter the capsule until he lets out some air; then he and his co-pilot, Pavel Belyayev have difficulties sealing the hatch. Following this, the rockets that will return them to Earth malfunction. All of this makes them late for touch down and they land somewhere in the arctic woods of Upper Kama Uplands – and might as well have crashed onto another planet. A nervous helicopter pilot despatched to find them is told to `keep an eye out for a red and white parachute`.

All of this did happen, and although you wonder how much it has been embellished, you still hold your breath, much as we did for Apollo 13 from 1995.

Realism.

Like the previous year’s similar Ledokol, the film tempers its hero worship with period details: the astronaut’s space food is borsch in toothpaste tubes, Mission Control constitutes a downbeat cottage industry in an air craft hangar, and the head of operations is a stressed and unfit man in danger of a heart seizure. Leonev himself comes across as a bit of a chancer. For example, when his comrade breaks his foot following a sky dive, Leonev’s first response is to turn up at his hospital and fix a weight to the man’s suspended leg so that he may continue to exercise.

Visual feast.

The contemporaneous American movies Gravity (2013) and Life (2017)had shown that directors now possess the means to evoke the feel of being suspended above our aquamarine orb as though it were for real. Vremya Pervyh also does not let us down in this respect. The sky diving scenes and the closing sequences in the forest are also spectacular – as befits a 3-D movie.

The film’s message which is along the lines of the old `hang on in there`, and was emotive enough for some of the audience to clap at the end of the initial cinema showing. I was just glad to have learnt a little about some of the unsung feats of the pre-Moon landing space missions.

These reviews were written at the time of the films release and were posted in Moskvaer (now defunkt) and the BKC IH Newsletter.

Lead image: Still from Ledokol – Kinoteatr.ru

BETTER THE DEMON WE KNOW….

`DOMOVOI:`A new Folk Horror fantasy from Russia pits an an old folk goblin against the Devil himself. Is it evidence of a coming `patriotic` trend in Russian cinema or something more subtle?

Domovoi represents the first Russian film in the horror genre to come my way since Detektor from two years back. (We could mention Claustro here, but for all its ethnic Russian connections this remains a Kazakh product).

Two weary years and three months have dragged on since Russia’s commander-in-chief ordered his tanks and soldiers to make their way into a neighbouring sovereign nation. Many Russian motion pictures doing the rounds since that fateful day will have been produced and shot previous to it. Now, however, enough time has elapsed for us to start to see products produced in the atmosphere of Russia in a time of war. Domovoi is one such a film.

Domovoi came out from Nashe Kino on 4^th April of this year. It consists of an overt contribution to the folk horror subgenre. This subgenre has gained traction in many countries of late with such films as Midsommar (2019) and, from Indonesia, Dancing Village: The Curse Begins (2024). Here regional folklores form the basis for supernatural terrors in the here and now.

Guest from Slavic folklore.

Here it is the turn of the domovoi to be the creature that gets featured. This East European hobgoblin, also known as the Old Man of the House, dwells in the back of stoves. He may incorporate the spirit of a long dead family member. Sometimes also taking the form of a pig or a cat, the domovoi’s main role is to defend the hearth and home, although he can be capricious. (Nor is is he just from the past: I have spoken to at least two young Russian women who were prepared to give some credence to his existence).

The screen friendly version of the domovoi. [horfor.online]

Old hands.

A Chelyabinsk born 48-year-old called Andrey Zagidullin sat on the tall chair for this film. He already boasts a track record of a string of TV thrillers to his credit such as Senser (2019), Phantom (2012) and Whirlpool (2022) like a Podgaevsky of television.

The script is from Ivan Eliseev (Syndrome, 2021) and Maria Ogneva who worked on the rather similarQueen of Spades 2: Through the Looking Glass (2019).

The two main stars are Vasilia Nemtsova who is but 14 and whose cameo performance in Epidemia (2019) drew comment from one Stephen King saying that it gave him goosebumps (Yandex.KZ/turbo, 5/12/2019).

The muse: Vasilia Nemstova [Kinoteatr.ru]

She acts alongside the fresh-faced twenty-year -old Oleg Chugunov who has been quite prolific with screen appearances of late, but who I last saw six years ago in the leading role in Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest.

Natalia Vdovina and Vitaly Kishenko are convincing enough as the conniving step-parents but the player who gifts the drama with a real classy presence is one Rosa Khairullina. This award winning 62-year-old actress, like a sort of female Peter Cushing, brings a palpable forbidding gravitas to her role as a female shaman.

Rosa Khairullina stealing the show [Kinoteatr.ru]

Displacement.

The main action opens in a primitive but alluring wooden dacha in a rural area (it would not have beern so out of place in Onegin in fact). Artyom (Chugunov) and Varya (Nemstova) live there a spartan life as, having lost their parents in an accident, they are looked after by their elderly and ailing grandmother – and they look after her too.

When she croaks her last on her bed, she leaves the young pair the advice that, in accordance with long held lore, they should take a piece of coal from the current residence and transfer it to the fire of any new household they should find themselves in.

Later, installed in a new school the kids are soon taken by a wealthy couple in the architecture business. Their home, as might be expected, is all minimalism and swish modernity in the Scandinavian style. Artyom makes an effort to gel with this new beginning but his younger sister feels uneasy and cannot.

The residence does have a fire, however, and the children, remembering their granny, consign to lumps of coal from their old house to its flames.

It is from that point that the things begin to befall the house. An entity seems to be making itself known. The step-parents, who have been hiding their own murky secret, decide to call in the services of a witch to banish this spectral intruder.

`What do you know about the cult of the ancestor? ` this imposing woman asks of her clients. She is making reference to the domovoi….

The fantasia will take us through various rituals and the action will lead us back to the old dacha. There a possessed Varya in league with the domovoi will unleash their sorcery to battle with the Great Horned One himself….

Sombre story.

It is the direction and then the photography that impresses the viewer at first. The former establishes a kind of doomy intensity which pervades everything and the latter evokes a crepuscular world of washed out blues and shadows.

The moody soundtrack, for which the much in demand 53-year-old Chuvash violinist Alexei Aigi is responsible, reinforces the sense that this is no disposable teen flick of a film, but something treading deeper waters.

In spite of this Domovoi does trip up. It unveils the monster far too soon in the narrative and then the culmination is a showdown in the style of a VyatcheslavPodgaevsky film (Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest et al) where every mainstay of contemporary horror film – floating people, attenuated screaming, glowing eyes…ad nauseam are all rolled into a ball and hurled at us.

A film for its time?

The cinema in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where I saw the film on April 6^th was fuller than such films are as a rule. Indeed, there is something of a chasm between the critical response and what the ordinary punters are saying about it. The latter seem satisfied at seeing a proper scary movie and one with a national flavor. The magazine critics though, riding on the back of their unshakeable view that Russians can never do horror, have carped at all manner of technical details about the plotting or the script.

There were some more nuanced write ups. Alexey Litovchenko writing in Kinoreporter.ru dubbed the film `the first patriotic mystical horror`. He did so on account of the fact that the character of the domovoi `personifies family values, the memory of generations, spirituality and all that is native and age old`. The witch, on the other hand, embodies `imported Western mysticism`.

Litovchenko seems to have hit on something here. Of course, Podgaevsky has been churning out similar kind of homespun occult yarns for over a decade now, but Domovoi seems to have nailed its colours to its mast in a more blatant way that any of his ever did. Can we bracket this film in the same surreptitious Z-patriot league as Onegin?

One thing that confuses the matter is the closing scene. The two orphans, their old home having been burnt to the ground and their would-be minders carted off by the politisia, find themselves alone in the morning moping though the ashy ruins with nothing but an old icon to provide them with any comfort….Could this be a metaphor for a desolate and isolated post-war Russia?

All political underpinnings aside, there are two fresh features in the film which I enjoyed. One is the location in a modern building quite unlike the hackneyed Old Dark House backdrop to such tales. The other is the fact that it upended the usual `the-Monster-be- Bad` expectation.

Main image: Youtube.

`We must change `em all!` The Political Significance of `Evgeny Onegin`

Pushkin’s classic has been claimed by different generations. Is the latest screen ONEGIN anything more than a sterile extravaganza designed to glorify Russia’s Imperial past?

Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel `Evgeny Onegin`is the best-known work of Russia’s national poet and upheld as a pinnacle of Russian literature. Alexander Seergevich, an aristocrat with some African heritage, harboured sympathies with the Decembrists who plotted against Tsar Nicholas’s extended autocracy. Penned between 1825 and 1832 and published in serial form before the standardized version came out in 1837, `Evgeny Onegin` was very much about Pushkin’s time. It also represented a turning away from Romanticism and towards a new Naturalism.

The novel concerns the life and times a young nobleman – a `madcap youth` – blighted with `the British spleen/Transported to our Russian clime`. This takes place over eight Cantos which end on a rather avant-garde cliffhanger. It is known that Pushkin had some further Cantos up his sleeve but destroyed them possibly because they contained rebukes to the Tsar himself. There is even a tantalising suggestion that Onegin’s fate was to have been him joining forces with the Decembrists (whose attempted insurrection ended in 1825 when the novel finished).

What we are left with is not an obvious political protest (although it is difficult to imagine young Onegin being enlisted into any kind of army campaign). It is more a cautionary tale. Moving from the social whirl of St Petersburg to an estate in a village, Onegin meets a German romantic youth who is to become his best friend. He, in turn introduces him to a shy young woman – Tatiana – who becomes besotted with him. The best friend Onegin slays by accident in a pointless duel and he rebuffs the woman. Later, older and wiser and having been travelling he returns to reclaim Tatiana but now she is married and she leaves him in limbo….

Onegin as a metrosexual [source:Pictures pibig.info]

A Hero of Whose Times?

`Evgeny Onegin` proves a challenging work to realise on the screen, being based around the tone of its narration and a solitary anti-hero. The first attempt, from the trailblazer of Russian film Vasily Goncharov came in 1911. It would take another staggering 47 -years for another cinema version to appear – in the form of a filming of Tchiakovsky’s opera.

The new standard.

Coming out on March 8^th, Women’s Day, of this year and just before the predetermined re-election of Putin, the newest film version was directed by Satrik Andreasyan. Known for his commercial approach to film making, he hails from Armenia but embraces the pro-war cause with the zeal of the convert.

`You should be ashamed to show such disrespect to your country`, he told fellow artists on Twitter who had come out against the war in February 2022.

Onegin comprises a lengthy and opulent family blockbuster. It gained first place in the box office for March 7^th to 10^th making 331 million roubles I four days (Dzen.ru, 11/3/24).

Through an Imperial lense….

Most people’s previous encounter with `Evgeny Onegin` will have come via one of the best-known operas by Tchiakovsky. This dates from 1878, a time when Russia was embroiled in the Russo-Turkish war (in which Russia sought to regain territory lost in previous engagements). This masterpiece, by the author of the 1812 Overture, cemented the novel’s reputation as a national mascot. However, it also relegates the anti-hero himself to the role of a supporting character. It is Tatiana and her feelings which take centre stage in this opera.

….and a Soviet one.

Post 1917, Tchiakovsky’s piece had become a part of the operatic repertoire. Nevertheless, the imperial grandeur it displayed was now out of step with the building of a communist future. Refreshing new directions in realism resulted. Now the players had to contend with mosquitoes and some of the scenery, such as the fountains were shown to be in a state of disrepair (to symbolize the moribund nature of the bourgeoise). (Operanews.ru/1610).

Following the Great Patriotic War, however, a measure of pomp and circumstance became allowable again if it could be framed as part of Russian national heritage. In 1958, as the Soviet Union’s third Sputnik whirled around the Earth, Lenfilm laid on a technicolour treatment of Tchiakovsky’s classic directed by Roman Tikhomirov. Still, this does not seem excessive in grandiosity: the focus is all on the character’s emotions as brought out by actors with opera singer’s voices dubbed on top.

Foreign interpretations.

The South African John Cranko adapted `Evgeny Onegin` into a ballet in 1965 (just called `Onegin`). For this he used the music of Tchiakovsky, but not from the opera. Here the emphasis was on a man who, despite all of his wealth and privilege, nevertheless finds himself ineffectual. This toured Leningrad in 1972 and elicited criticisms from a Russian audience who felt their national property was being trod on. Tatiana’s name day celebration in the ballet was in the summer -when every one knows it would have to be in January, and so on. Nevertheless the ballet has since been much staged in Russia. I caught it in Moscow just a few years back.

The British actor Ralph Fiennes played the titular role in Onegin from 1999. Fiennes had already made his name seven years earlier playing a similar Byronic character, Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights. Here Onegin is portrayed as a tortured soul in the Gothic tradition. This was an overt English interpretation. Yet it is the case that Pushkin name checks Byron’s antihero Childe Harold a few times in his novel.

Picture perfect.

Onegin 2024: accent on the splendour [recommend.ru]

The new Onegin comes with the tagline: ‘The love story that conquered the world`. Like `Doctor Zhivago` then, it is being framed as a romance, which is a half-truth. Throughout its two and a half hours running time it retells the story with efficiency. We get to see some location shots – the Palace of the Grand Duke of Vladimir Alexandrovich and the Pushkin mountains. We see brass knockers, wood burning samovars and white top hats. It all looks new and clean and everything is arranged before the camera for the best view. Unmemorable muzak of a classical kind underpins it all. Some are comparing it to the British film Pride and Prejudice (which came out in 2005, when the U.K was party to an invasion of Iraq), but it is too well-scrubbed for even that comparison.

The main players – Viktor Dobronravov (Onegin) and Elizaveta Moryak (Tatiana) are 41 and 29 respectively. There may be something in Andreasyan’s claim that the middle-aged of today are the teens and twenty-somethings of yesteryear but the sociopolitical concern with disaffected youth is lost. In particular, the tall and stocky Dobronravov looks more like an alpha-chad than any superfluous man.

Also lost is the saucy foot fetishism of the narrator, Tatiana’s involvement in pagan divination, the disheartening journey to Moscow, the mistreatment of the serfs and – above all -the mordant take on the upper-middle-classes (`Rogue and enchanter of yore/now buffoon, glutton and a bore`)

Let’s allow some caveats. Dobronravov does do a good line in ennui. The character of Lenski is well realized and the wonderful Alexander Yatso features as Tatiana’s husband. Also, there is an interesting innovation where Onegin has a parallel dream to that of Tatiana’s.

This constitutes a Z- Patriot film at heart. It looks forward to the past. It is a bland and kitsch waxworks museum and too precious to offer any nourishment for either the mind or the soul.

All quotations from the text (which includes the title) come from Henry Spalding’s translation published by Karo, St Pwetersburg, 2017.

The lead image, showing a scene from the 1958 film, is from:bacilleraticoefilo.com

ALLOWED TODAY….

A cinema adaptation of a once banned novel, directed by an opponent of the war and starring some non-Russian players has become a box office winner in Russia.

Russia Beyond have dubbed Mikhail Bulgakov’s most famous work, Master and Margarita `one of the favourite novels of all Russians`. This accolade holds in spite of the novel having featured in the Russian school curriculum for the last twenty-two years.

Bulgakov – Muscovite, physician, playwright and novelist toiled on this epic novel for the best part of two decades. That is, between 1928 and up to his death at 48 in 1940.

The strictures of the Stalin -lead Soviet regime, where `Socialist Realism` was exalted, proved the kiss of death to the visionary wildness and mockery which is central to Bulgakov’s voice. Not until 1968 – and in Paris at that – did a version of Master and Margarita see mass print in its entirety.

Poisoned chalice.

Since then this fantasia has left its fingerprints all over the culture worldwide. It is hard to conceive of Sergey Lukyanenko’s brand of Urban Fantasy or, for that matter, Viktor Pelevin’s `post-modernism` existing without Bulgakov’s prior prompting.

Then, for instance, the actor Daniel Radcliffe is enough of a fan to have travelled to Moscow to pay homage to the House of Bulgakov which is to be found there, as a birthday treat.

There have been repeated endeavors to enact Master and Margarita for theatres and for celluloid. A few of these have ended in tears. You can even hear a predictable rumour to the effect that – like the …er…`Scottish play` – a sword of Damocles hangs over those that would produce it. Nevertheless 2005 saw a much-repeated television series of it by the controversial Vladimir Bortenko.

Foreign agents.

Film poster for `Master and Maragrita (2024)`
[Wikipedia]

This latest version has been threatened for some time and has changed hands once or twice. At one point it was to be called Woland (the name of the magician figure in the story). Even with the traditional name the producers seem keen to stress that this is no straight reproduction of the source material.

The director is the 45-year-old Mikhail Lokshin, who studied psychology at Moscow State University, now resides in America and has made his disagreement with the invasion of the Ukraine clear. Roman Kantor, known for Epidemia , the television thriller that made it to Netflix, is the scriptwriter,

Alongside Evgeny Tsyganov, a Muscovite with a very lengthy string of screen appearances to his credit, as the Master, stars his real-life wife, the model Yulia Snigir who hails from Donskoy in the Tula region – as Maragarita.

The German West Berliner August Diehl plays Woland and the Danish actor Claes Bang, best known for playing the lead in a 2022 British production of Dracula, is cast in the very different role of Pontius Pilate.

Crazy Circus.

Evgeny Tsyganov (Master) and his real life wife Yulia Snigir (Maragarita) in a fictionalised Moscow [journal.tinkoff.ru]

In this story, the Master works as a writer in the U.S.S.R of Five-Year Plans and purges. His latest play, which concerns Pontius Pilate, receives a hostile reception from a committee of fellow scribes with the result that his play is taken off. The Master’s despair is lightened somewhat when he encounters the elegant wife of a colonel – Margarita. They click at once and she becomes both his muse and his cheerleader.

In a fine conceit, the more fantastical events for which Master and Margarita are celebrated occur in the Master’s brain, sparked off by a meeting with an eccentric foreigner, and which forms the basis of a new novel.

Some of the antics of Woland and his merry troupe have been left out of the film but there does remain the exciting chase through Moscow and the conjuring show which culminates in money raining down upon the grasping Soviet citizens. The damned talking cat, Azazello is present too, of course – with some no too obtrusive C.G.I.

Then we get the cathartic scene which is Margarita’s story. She makes a Faustian pact with Woland’s set. Able to fly and become invisible she enacts vengeance on the tormentors who have imprisoned her husband in a mental asylum.

Also retained – being crucial to the overall coda – are the sequences involving Pontius Pilate in Roman ruled Jerusalem. We see him lower his own moral instincts and accede to the crucifixion of Yeshua Na Naziri – Jesus Christ to you and me. Interspersed into the main action, these scenes seem to be taken from the Master’s own aborted drama.

Extravaganza.

With a reputed 1.2 billion rubles at his disposal, Lokshin has laid out a feast for the eyes. (the lavishness reminds me of the film Empire V). The cast are all walking works of art (one of the Committee critics resembles Heinrich Himmler).

The Moscow of much of the film represents a parallel one where, for example, the planned Palace of Soviets has been built and zeppelin-like dirigibles are a common form of transport for the elite.

The lighting and colour is crepuscular and this, taken with the ruminating score by Anna Drubich (who worked on the American film Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark two years back), conjures up the right sense of sinister mystery.

Woland’s lines are in German and the Jerusalem scenes seem to be in Latin. This bold directorial decision is then compromised by the recordings being revoiced by the actors in Russian. This begs the question as to why they were not subtitled.

Enigmatic tale.

The author with his baffling masterpiece [kp.ru/afisha/msk]

When I first slogged through Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita some years ago,I reached the last page with a feeling of irritated bafflement. What was Bulgakov trying to tell me? Russian readers told me that it was about Love or about Stalin. Then again it could be an expose of the kind of cowardice that Pilates gave in to. All of these readings could be true at the same time, but the novel still strikes me as one big riddle.

The Russian reviewers of this film have noticed a new relevance in it. Other than all being unanimous that the foreign actor playing Woland has excelled the others, they have picked up on the iconic line, `It’s allowed today, but not tomorrow`. The uncertainty as to what can and cannot be said in today’s Russia has given this sentence a new resonance.

Those who would shut down the film are out there. One Yegor Kholmogorov, columnist for the Russia Today channel, has characterized this release as `propaganda for satanism and terrorism`. Does he speak as a representative of those in power? Today maybe not, but tomorrow…

Small focal point.

I caught the film on a cold day in mid-February on a weekday afternoon showing in a small cinema in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Even so, I found myself among a flock of about twenty young ethnic Russians. Argument i Fakti (11^th February, 2024)informs us that Master and Margarita has taken only second place to the ice skating feelgood drama Ice 3 and has already brought in 208.2 million on the weekend of 17^th and 18^th February alone.

Perhaps Kholmogorov and his fellow Z-Patriot cohorts can gain succor from the Curse-of-Master and Margarita-adaptations and just wait for it to work its magic.

Main image: sport.express.ru

The Old Dark Apartment.

Is the screen Chiller CLAUSTRO (VZYAPERTI) the first neo-Gothic Sovietcore film?

The arrival of this film last September was heralded by elaborate installations about it in select cinemas – a rare promotional effort on behalf of such a low budget affair. Had it not been for that, I would not have been one of the dozen or so punters who turned up for a late showing at a central cinema in Almaty late last September.

The 3-D film promotional installation which was on display at Dostyk Plaza cinema this September.

Filmed in Kazakhstan and by Qara Studios, CLAUSTRO or VZYAPERTI, constitutes one subtle and quite distinctive hour and thirty minutes of supernatural chills.

Two titles for it are out there – VZYAPERTI being the most common and which translates as `Locked In`. This however is also the name of a recent Hollywood thriller, as you will discover should you attempt a search on this film, even in Russian. So, I am going to go with CLAUSTRO which sounds fresher and more evocative anyway.

Kazakhstan’s brush with cinematic horror has been more bite-sized and recent that that of the Great Bear’s, so CLAUSTRO might be taken as something of a test case. It is significant, therefore, to note that this film shines a flickering lamp into the current relationship between Kazakhstan and its former overlord in the in the North, the Russian Federation.

Almaty inspiration.

Shot two years earlier, but released in September 14^th of this year, CLAUSTRO adapts a novel by an Almaty novelist, Alexander Mendybaev who has posted online a number of supernatural suspensers, the one in question being TENANTS from 2017 (since published by Meloman in the summer of this year).

The bright young director responsible for the on-screen realization of it is 35-year-old Olzhas Bayalbaev whose directorial debut was with the film GOK, also released this year, which tackles the thorny issue of corruption among civil servants. However, Bayalbaev grew up with R.L Stine stories (as he told an interviewer with Optimism K.Z on 14^th September this year) and horror was in his blood.

As for the screenplay, another Almaty resident, 32 -year-old Sabina Tusupova, known for her part in the nineties-based drama ZERE from 2021, teamed up with the author Mendybaev to write this. The retro-modernist musical score, so important in an ambience lead production such as this, was brought to us by a twenty-something musician known to many as Dana Tunes, or Dana Zulpykhar.

Roman Zhukov, 35, from Aktobe (Kazakhstan) who also appeared in the Kazakh portmanteau horror SCARY STORIES TO TELL AROUND THE CAMPFIRE from 2018, plays the main protagonist. His stately side-kick however hails from Rostov-on-Don in Russia -Elizaveta Yurieva- who starred l in the Russian TV series CLINICAL 13, broadcast last year, which fuses medical drama with the occult.

CLAUSTRO will resonate with anyone who spent any time in Soviet period housing. The visual iconography here is all of that and its corresponding period. From this base the proceedings conjure up a sense of spookiness. As well as landline phones and record players, we get to see Soviet era TV shows, toys and confectionery. The brown and grey/pale blue colour scheme is well judged and some of Bardag Arginiov’s photography could be stills from Vogue magazine or the like.

Entrapment.

Max (Zhukov) is driving on an errand to hook up with an old friend. We discover him as he motors through the steppes and alongside a glittering reservoir (much of the film was shot in Kapchagai – AKA Konaev, a popular tourist destination on the banks of the Lli river). On arrival he finds himself in a standard Soviet block of flats and interrupting a large family get-together which his friend enjoins him to become a part of.

Max is encouraged to join the party. {orda.kz]

It proves to be a predictable mix of tedium and drunken flirtation until, that is, the elderly paterfamilias at the head of the table begins to intone some odd, witchy imbroglio….

Max leaves the room and there meets Kima (Yurieva), the snooty resident of the flat, who has done the same. When they head back, they are aghast to find that all the guests have vanished and the room appears to have not been inhabited at all in recent times. Next, they discover find that there is no way out – all the exit doors lead them back to where they began. They are entombed in a world of endless receding mirrors reflecting mirrors, like some nightmarish Escher creation. The child phantoms then begin to appear and they are to learn that they will never escape until the issues of these ghosts from their past are laid to rest….

In fact, despite the striking nature of the premise, we have here a traditional trope from many a ghost story, that is the righting of old wrongs. One could even frame this film as making a comment on Kazakhstan ‘s ongoing troubled connection with its own Soviet heritage from which it is unable to escape whilst haunted by specters of past injustices.

Mendybaev and Bayalbaev deserve some credit for noticing, at last, the potential for neo-Gothic ambience that Soviet housing has long had. This is even a bit homely. (We see Kima, for example, painting her toe nails in a languid way whilst listening to Soviet jazz on her record player). The token love interest that arises from the two glamorous inmates does not seem forced, but it does detract a little from the claustrophobia of the central situation.

A style conscious motion picture. [Marie-Claire]

CLAUSTRO took me back to the Russian film KONVERT which I reviewed here a few years back. Both are supernatural dramas produced on a limited budget, oozing the atmosphere of post-Soviet urban environments and with redemption themes at their cores. CLAUSTRO could even pass for a Russian film, with its Slavic cast. It is a bit of a mystery, however, why this film, unlike KONVERT, should be restricted having an 18+ certificate.

CLAUSTRO is not a shocker but a stylish and indeed somewhat `hipsterish` art house movie. It is not all that likely to make many waves in mainstream cinema but it remains to be seen if it can kickstart a new interest in the horror genre among Kazakh film makers.

Lead image: Vlast.KZ

LATE APPOINTMENT WITH THE VAMPIRES.

A SCREENING OF `EMPIRE V` IN KAZAKHSTAN DEMONSTRATED THAT THE CONTROVERSIAL MOVIE LACKS THE IMPACT OF GINZBURG’S PREVIOUS ATTEMPT TO ADAPT A PELEVIN CLASSIC.

I caught my first sight of the marketing for Ampire V – EMPIRE V – at the beginning of last year in a cinema in Moscow in the form of a poster. The promised screening soon vanished and, a few months later, so did I.

Later I would discover the supposed rationale for the cancellation. There had been a dispute over the certification. EMPIRE V was submitted to the Ministry of Culture with an age rating of 16+. The men from the Ministry felt it should be higher.

To date this film has not been shown in any mainstream cinema in Russia, suffering the same fate as the lamented picture WE. The key presence in the film of one Miron Federov – AKA OXXYMIRON , the rapper who has protested the invasion of the Ukraine and has staged benefit concert on behalf of those affected – seems to give the lie to the official version of events.

Miron Federov, `foreign agent`: wooooh! He bites! [Youtube]

Neutral Kazakhstan, though, deemed this film fit to be projected onto the screens in Kazakh cinemas this September.

There seems an appropriate symbolism to the fact that the late screening in Kazakhstan came at around the same time as Russia released Svidetel (The Witness) which represents one of the first cinematic attempts to advocate for the Russian government’s side in the war.

Master’s return.

EMPIRE V constitutes a 114-minute-long (now) 18+ certificate urban fantasy which, as the Russian title hints at (if you reshuffle it), draws on the vampire trope. The film functions as a rendering of the eighth novel by the post-modernist Muscovite novelist Victor Pelevin.

Victor Ginzburg, 64, who could be called a `Russian David Lynch` directs. This Russian born American citizen already has form with the tortuous task of transforming Pelevin’s fevered mythologizing into something screen worthy. Ginzburg was behind the film Generation P the paranoiac Nineties based romp from eleven years back (which made enough of an impression on one dolt for him to name his blog after it).

Pavel Tabakov, a Moscow born 28-year-old (with just a hint of the young Malcolm McDowell about him) plays the lead role of the down-at-heal Everyman Ramon and Federov plays his mentor who ushers him into the ways of the vampire and a relative newcomer Taya Radenchko, 24, is Ramon’s fellow inductee who allures him so.

Ramon turned Rama [cybersport.metaratings.ru]

Other players include Vladimir Epifantsev, best known for his Rambo-like portrayal of an outlaw in the television series Flint (as well as for holding views critical of the Putin leadership) while the establishment insider Fyodor Bondarchuk puts in an odd, but not untypical, cameo also.

Fractals.

The texture of it all is a rich psychedelic odyssey. Many computer-generated visions of neural activity flash up before the viewer, as do fractal patterns. Meanwhile, the earthbound part of the events is staged in a series of opulent olde worlde interiors. It is all a bit Stephanie Meyers-meets- Thomas Pynchon and much of it would seem ridiculous were it not delivered with such deadpan earnestness.

Plucked from obscurity.

Roman (Tabakov), a one-time student of journalism, is living the life of dead-end cash in hand jobs before he sets his eyes on a promotional alert painted on the pavement promising special work.

Turning up to the address, he soon finds himself being spoken to by a masked menace (Epifantsev) and being informed that he is to be elevated into the realm of the creatures who really run the show. The man before him is about to die and must needs pass on his legacy. What ensues consists of the instruction of Ramon – now to be renamed Rama – into the dense protocols of the life of the vampires and how they hold sway over us muggles, who are but a dairy species.

Myths busted.

In the process, vampire mythology is lobbed sky high. For example, what small fangs they have play second place to a parasite in their mouths which they call `the tongue`. This can extract a small droplet of `red liquid` from the victim without them noticing and thus give the vampire access to their memories and knowledge.

They also imbibe the distilled essences of historical figures from Alexander Pushkin to Steve McQueen, the better to augment their capabilities.

Love is viewed as a form of combat and ownership of human society is achieved via a promotion of Glamour (consumerism) and Discourse (Empty chatter masquerading as discussion). They even fund vampire movies in order to install a false image of what they really are.

They do, however, transform into bats and this gives rise to the most memorable episodes in the film as Rama streaks over Moscow in scenes that could be a homage to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.

However, throughout his initiation Rama struggles with his existing sense of humanity and loyalty to it. Also, he becomes entranced by an insouciant, Hermione Grainger like graduate vampire (Radenchko).

Unbitten.

That is the framework to EMPIRE V but it is all served up with Pelevin’s trademark idiosyncrasies: modern Moscow merged with ancient Babylon, narcotic trips, philosophical chit-chat, mirthless grotesqueness and a strutting amoral elite and an atmosphere of disassociation.

Here is my problem: the entire vampire trope in itself has never been one which worked for me. For one thing I have never found vampires to be credible life-forms and hence not frightening and the sexual symbolism with which they are associated strikes me as tiresome. As much as EMPIRE V is iconoclastic about vampires, including the sexual angle, and as much as one could call this `a vampire film for people who don’t like vampire films`, the shtick still seems dated and facetious (Pelevin’s novel is 1`7 years old, after all).

Ginzburg does at least steer clear of the antisemitism which can be tallied with this kind of allegory (not having read the source material I cannot say the same of Pelevin).

Russia’s loss.

The refusal to screen this film by the Russian authorities has resulted in the inevitable `Streisand effect`. The Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal premiered the film in the West at the end of last July, making it the most talked about Russian film right now.

Too many of the resulting reviews regurgitate the assumption that this film has been banished from the big screen in its homeland because it is a clear satire of the oligarchic elite.

In fact, there have been Russian films before which have tilted at the same moneyed strata and made it to the cinemas. Rather it is the name of Federov, a `foreign agent` with anti-war views that has led to this stringent push back. (Indeed, there exist not a few oligarchs who would pull Russia out of the conflict, given half the chance).

EMPIRE V recalls Bekmambetov’s Night Watch and Day Watch (2004 and 2007) more than it does Generation P. By comparison it seems like a paler descendant of that classic.

Lead image: Se7enews.

A LEGEND FOR THE LOST.

On a street in Almaty there is a brass statue of Viktor Tsoi. Here’s why.

You stroll along the wide street called Abay Avenue which leads towards the Abay monument (dedicated to the poet, composer and reformer Abai Qunanbaiuly). You have a different poet and composer in mind, however, and just before you reach the gaping mouth of the Abay metro, you hang left and find yourself facing a large statue of a seated man and behind that an impressive fountain.

This is the entrance to the street which you take. The statue was of the composer Mukan Tulabaevich – the first Kazakh classical composer and author of the Kazakh national anthem. You, though, have another monument to another musician in mind and continue down the street You find yourself on a downward incline with trees on either side of you.

All of a sudden you are in the midst of some familiar verses as you are flanked by plaques all along the leafy pathway and these feature quotations from certain songs. You recognize some words from the legendary song Change.

Then you encounter the dark bronze statue. It has its back to you so you pass it and turn and find yourself facing an iconic tableau of a man in the centre of the path in the act of lighting a cigarette. Beneath him are the engraved word `Igla` – `The Needle`.

Soviet Cinema’s turning point.

From Kazakhfilm in 1988, The Needle was a film which kickstarted an all too brief trend of Kazakh New Wave cinema. Taking its cue from French New Wave films, this trend was willing to grapple with less than ideal social conditions (The Last Stop from 1989 about a soldier returning to his home town is another key example from this era).

For all its Avant-garde gestures The Needle brought in the punters, becoming the most watched film over the coming year. Furthermore, it made a superstar out of the leading man, who plays a character just known as Moreau. He is played by Viktor Tsoi, the lead singer and songwriter of the band Kino. Soviet Screen hailed this relative newcomer to the silver screen `the cinema actor of the year`.

Directed by the then 34-year-old Rashid Nugmanov, The Needle was shot in Alma Ata (then the capital of Kazakhstan, now known as Almaty and relegated to being `the capital of the South`) and took the St Petersburgian Tsoi to the land where his Korean father grew up. (There are many Koreans in the Central Asian states having resided in the Far East at the end of the Nineteenth Century).

One one level the film is a topical thriller. In it, an enigmatic stranger returns to his hometown to meet up with a past girlfriend and becomes embroiled in a feud with drug dealing gangs (this theme being something of a hot potato of the late Soviet period). Then again, the narrative uses the stylistics that are more common to modernist theatre than popular cinema. For example, Moreau’s girlfriend spends one sequence wearing a mask without explanation. In another scene, Moreau and some allies arrive to make a revenge attack on one of the drug dealers who is in a bath house. The men simple stand stock still on the edge of the pool and in this way some kind of violence is implied rather than depicted. Moreover, extended shots the parched wasteland of what was once the Aral Sea anchor the whole production in a dreamlike landscape.

Nor is The Needle just a showcase of Kino’s music. Sure enough, there is the presence of Kino’s mid-tempo interwoven guitar melodies here, but the songs do not dominate the tale. (Review of a Kino Album here)

The most famous song (written for the film) is `Blood type` which plays at the film’s denouement when Moreau stops to light a cigarette just before being knifed by one of his drug baron enemies.(This is the very scene recreated by the statue – which has been erected on the precise locale where it had been filmed some three decades earlier).

Eurasian superstar.

Viktor Robertovich Tsoi came into the world in June 21^st 1962 into a respectable family composed of an engineer father and P.E teacher mother. One crucial fact is that he spent his formative years in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). The proximity of this city to Finland made for a lot cultural interpenetration between it and Western Europe. Tsoi, somewhat set apart from his peers by his Asiatic appearance, came to idolize Bruce Lee. He was also enamored of the pop-rock scene of the Eighties in Britain and was familiar with such bands as Joy Division, The Smiths and Duran-Duran. He would flog his own hand-drawn reproductions of album covers to people in his circle.

Later under the moniker Garin and the Hyperboloids – a reference to a Spy-fi thriller by Alexei Tolstoy which was both filmed and serialized on Soviet television -became a part of the officially sanctioned Leningrad Rock Scene (a period of history examined in the film Summer – my review here).

We should be grateful for the Soviet policy which insisted that bands could not do covers of Western songs but had to write their own material – without this edict one feels that Tsoi and others of his ilk might well have remained cover bands.

Instead, throughout a twelve-year period, from 1978 to 1990 Tsoi, with a lean black-clad rock-hipster-cum-Kung fu fighter persona, put Russian rock on the map through his guitar, bass and piano playing and, of course, his portentous low register voice – but above all his zeitgeist laden lyrics. Kino would release some four hundred songs, many of them still sung by young buskers throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They played to a huge crowd as Luzhniki stadium in Moscow before Tsoi met his end in a car accident in Latvia in 1990.

In the meantime, a great deal of `Kinomania` had been generated. It is said that some fans took their own lives on hearing of the loss of their hero. In the longer term, conspiracy theories abound as to the exact nature of Tsoi’s death. There is also much lively debate about just what Tsoi would have made of the end of the Soviet Union, which he had got so close to but never got to see.

There is also a deep irony in the fact that some of Tsoi’s songs have been requisitioned by the Putin regime and turned into pro-war anthems sung by military choirs! (Needless to say, Tsoi was a draft dodger).

Metal Ghost.

In the presence of Nugmanov, the lead guitarist of Kino band Yuri Kaspyarin and (a real sign of the times) the Mayor of Almaty, the statue was unveiled on the thirtieth anniversary of The Needle’s release – June 21^st 2018. The sculptor – one Matvey Matushkin was born on the year that Tsoi embarked on his musical career.

Tsoi’s metal ghost continues to haunt this former country of the Soviet Union, forever lighting a cigarette in grim reflection….

A CHILD WITH SECRETS.

The film DETECTOR is a state of the art psychothriller that offers some cold comfort in its cloistered outlook.

The 47-year-old Kostas Marsaan, hailing from a village in the far North East of Russia, Yakutia, made a name for himself with his folk horror film Ichchi from two years back and has since become identified with a `Yakutian horror` scene in film.

His latest motion picture, a wintry puzzler called Detector is neither a horror nor set in Yakutia but yet bears many of the hallmarks of his more niche debut. Released in Russia early this March, the film consists of a psychological thriller with some modern Gothic trappings. Like Sisters it might also be said to partake a little of the much talked about trend of `Elevated horror`. In short, meandering between mystery, thriller and chiller, this is not a film that aims to have you jump back into your seat.

The main writer – Ivan Stanislavsky – is known more for comedies. He was responsible for Predators from three years ago and this is a wacky comedy crime caper.

The cast, on the other hand, is an ensemble one composed of performers notable for their involvement in this film genre.

The 38-year-old Nizhny-Novgorod born Ekaterina Vilkova resurrects her tough-but-endangered police investigator from the TV series Cold Shores. Likewise, the 48-year-old from Tallinn – Kirill Kyaro -appeared in Teach Me to Live (2016) and the TV series The Consultant (2017) as a psychiatrist and finds himself once again typecast in that role.

Detector is not set in Yakutia but in the more relatable (to many) edges of Moscow and, whilst not as exotic, the bare trees and snowy expanse of this do enhance the foreboding mood that the story builds up. Also, the setting in a four storey luxury dacha (which – Fun Fact –was the one built and lived in by the cosmonaut Alexey Leonev, no less!)

Juvenile messenger.

Viktoria, a police operative (Vilkova) is on the chase for a cold-blooded murderer. Ignoring advice from her colleagues, she enters a derelict building where he may be present. It is when she discovers a headless corpse that she is lunged at from behind and then slashed in the belly a few times. Her assailant leaves her for dead.

Viktoria recovers but is traumatized and has to accept the fact that she can never bear children. In the meantime, however, she has fallen in love with her psychotherapist. Novel is a wealthy man and she shacks up with him in his plush dacha beyond the capital.

Kyaro and Vilkova as the Ideal Couple in an aspirational abode [KG-Portal.ru]

On deciding to adopt a child they pay a visit to an orphanage. While they are looking, a head nurse shows a drawing made by one of the children. It depicts a brutal attack on a woman. Viktoria is struck by how much it reminds her of her own ordeal She decides there and then that the orphan who produced this is the one that they will take.

Dasha seems an odd and withdrawn child and this may owe to the fact that her own mum and dad perished in a domestic conflagration. She continues to produce sinister sketches – even putting them on the walls of her room. Viktoria is convinced that they depict scenes involving the murderer that she had been hunting.

Is the girl clairvoyant or does she have some kind of inside knowledge?

Viktoria returns to her police colleagues full of stories. She is met with unenthused doubts but, perhaps out of loyalty, they do assign a young investigator – Kostya (Gela Meskhi) to the case.

Together they find themselves running up against a series of blind alleys while Viktoria’s obsessive quest puts a strain on her relationship. Indeed, Novel has long since decided that Dasha should be sent back to her orphanage. When the girl stabs him in the hand matters come to the boil….

Distraction by numbers.

The bare bones of the premise do call to mind Olga Gorodetska’s supernatural thriller from 2019 Stray. However, Detector then takes an almost opposite direction. In fact, the plot could almost be a truncated season of Cold Shores. As is the way with this subgenre there is a final reveal that intends to induce gasps of shock but which can be seen coming.

Light on message, heavy on atmosphere.

The tagline for this film is `Take a Closer Look at Who You Live With`. That might, in fact, be the sole insight that one can take away from what is a rather domestic and insular thriller. Wider resonances about Russia or of the world Out There are hard to find here. That in fact may be part of the film’s appeal. I myself savored all one hour forty minutes of this creepy detective yarn, with parts that might have been written by Chat GPT but which oozed a well sustained macabre ambience throughout.

Indeed, the online user reviews, which more often than not are given over to sneering and cynicism have been positive and almost gushing for once.

For example, a Dmitry, writing on Megacritic.ru had this to say:

`The film `Detector` makes the viewer sit on the edge of the chair….The plot is unusual and unexpected…and the actors played their roles perfectly…Her [Vika’s] experiences and emotions are conveyed to the viewer so vividly that it is difficult not to be interested in what is happening on the screen…

And so on. This review was not an exception.

Nevertheless, in the cinema in Almaty (in a district calling itself `Moscow`) I found myself, for the umpteenth time, to be the only person in the hall.

Main image: Kladez Zolota. Livejournal.com

ALL SOUND AND FURY: THE FILM MIRA

THIS APOCALYPSE YARN, FILMED ON LOCATION IN RUSSIA’S FAR EAST, IMPRESSES WITH ITS BANGS AND WHIZZES – BUT WHERE’S THE SUBSTANCE?

Last December, an ambitious extravaganza, part disaster movie and part science fiction epic, reached Russian screens in time for the winter holidays. (I would have to wait another three months for it to get to Almaty in Kazakhstan).

MIRA after spending a lot of time on the launch pad, came caparisoned with illustrious associations.

Dmitry Kiselyov (not to be confused with the execrable T.V pundit of the same name) was the man with the megaphone. His resume shows that he helped to edit the iconic NIGHTWATCH and DAYWATCH films (2004 and 2006) and directed the quintessential family adventure-romance BLACK LIGHTNING in 2009. He has also taken us into the cosmos before with FIRST TIME (2013), a credible biopic of the first man to walk in space, Alexei Leonov.

One of the key roles is filled by a fifty-year-old Ukrainian Jew Anatoly Bely, a well-regarded stage actor who also has appeared in a great many television serials. He acts alongside a relative newcomer – Veronika Ustinova. Hailing from Ulyanosk, this seventeen-year-old has been compared by some to Margot Robbie. Here she showcases her talents as the cosmonaut’s daughter.

The film needs an epic score to complement its scenario and Yuri Poteenko is just the man for this. He also provided the score for NIGHTWATCH and DAYWATCH and has form with disaster movies in the form of METRO (2013).

Girl interrupted.

In Vladivostok, Lera, a fifteen-year-old malcontent, lives with a divorced mother and her paunchy lummox of a new stepfather and an exasperating younger brother. Only in her races – she runs for events in a local stadium -does she come alive.

However, her father, Arabs, works as a cosmonaut and spends much time in orbit with his Russian colleagues in a space station called Mira A. With the futuristic assistance of an A.I computer – with the titular nickname of Mira -this absent father is able to manipulate technologies down on earth and thus keep watch over his daughter. Unimpressed by this, Lera gives the middle finger to a street C.C.T.V camera that Arabs has commandeered in this fashion.

A hard rain.

Scientists on board Mir A have been attempting to warn those down below of an impending cosmic hazard in the form of a cluster of meteorites en route for our blue planet. (The actor Igor Kriphunov, best known for his work with Svyatelsav Podgaevsky, has a well-cast cameo role here.)

Their warnings meet with deaf ears….When the meteorites arrive, they disable the Mir. A space station and kill most of the staff, leaving only Arabs and Mira functioning.

Meanwhile Vladivostok is laid waste by the onslaught and Lera is rendered homeless and loses her little brother. It is here that the father and Mira’s creepy magic takes centre stage and a new father-daughter bond is forged. Together, using whatever visual and sound portal they can find, they relocate the lost brother and, while they are at it, also prevent an off shore tanker from detonating and taking half of Vladivostok with it.

Defiance of odds.

MIRA seems to lay down a heroic ethos. We learn that Lera exhibits a phobia of fire and that this originated from a time she was trapped in a burning lift, which her father could not rescue her from. This time, though, she will have to face down this terror – by joining forces with her dad.

Even her boyfriend – with something of a `woke` twist – boasts a prosthetic arm and must overcome the feeling of stigma this gives him.

Aside from motivational homilies, what can we take away from this tale? That remote parenting can work? That surveillance technologies might be used for the betterment of humanity?

Convincing mayhem.

I took this film in on the second row in a hall in the Chaplin cinema in Megapolis, Almaty. This featured a sizeable screen with Sensurround and, whilst I have never been one to salivate over FX the collision sequences in this film – all falling masonry, explosions and skidding vehicles – were among the most effective I have experienced.

Carboard cutouts.

If only the human input had been as animated. Ustinova delivers a performance which exudes dignity and seems believable and she represents the discovery of a new female lead in cinema. The rest of the cast, however, function as cyphers of family types: the caring but out of touch mother, the annoying but cute little brother and the cloddish but well-meaning stepfather.

Even Bely feels, in a strange way, insipid as though he had found that the script had not given him enough scope. Instead, he puts on dark glasses whenever he needs to convey a bit of character.

Perhaps this explains why MIRA, despite having some affecting scenes, stopped short of jerking my tears as much as it intended. I can say, however, that it did earn my unflagging attention for all of its long 150 minutes running time.

Magpie approach.

Refreshing though the Vladivostok setting is, the film is otherwise a stitch up of borrowed ideas. The Hollywood offering ARMAGEDDON springs to mind as one of the models (meteor shower, Mir space station and father-daughter issues).

The creators did not only draw on American precedents though. The conceit that forms the science fictional hub of the whole thing – a space station with the capacity to gatecrash earth side technologies – recalls the ATTRACTION sequel INVASION (2020) where a sinister intelligence in orbit could do the same.

Unpleasant resonances.

Above all, the meteorite attack scenes could not help but to put me in mind of the horrific shelling of certain Ukrainian cities by the Russian military. This, together with the very name of the film (which means `peace` in Russian) could even cause some to suspect that this film has a subtext.

One man who might like to think so is Anatoly Bely himself. After denouncing the invasion of Ukraine, he left the Moscow Arts Theatre last summer and now resides in Israel.

TWO DARK HOMETRUTHS: the films `LIKE A MAN and SISTERS.

Marriage and the Male Mystique come under the spotlight in these two fresh psychological dramas.

This November a pair of cinematic dramas from Russia arrived in Kazakhstan to add to the winter chill. They seem to be plotting parallel vectors in that they both lay bare the murkier ends of what is expected of men and women in our times. They do so in an entertaining way, minus anything in the way of sociological agit-prop.

Po Muzhski – the title gets translated as either `Manly` or `Like A Man` (I prefer the latter) -was released by Central Partnership on November 10^th and seemed to come out of the blue with a rookie director and a lead actor best known for online comedies.

This is by no means a comedy, however. Indeed, it comes under the label of `drama-thriller` which is as good a pigeonhole as you can get. Nevertheless, there were a handful of people to see it at the Almaty cinema where I went and it has garnered appreciative responses from the online feedback forums.

Like a Man was directed by Maxim Kulagin who has been responsible for shorts until now. The protagonist Gleb, is the 36-year-old Anton Lapenko who hails from the Moscow satellite dormitory town of Zelenograd. A redoubtable talent, he created a fanbase with `Inside Lapenko` on Instagram – a satirical character driven comedy which draws comparisons with Monty Python.

The 34-year-old Ekaterina Shcherbakova takes the part of Gleb’s stunning wife Polina. (With exquisite irony she also turned up in the comedy (Not) Ideal Man from a few years ago).

Whilst the film triumphs in not featuring obvious villains, the 28-year-old actor Sergey Vasin, who has done television work before, portrays a chilling and believable low-life antagonist.

Gleb has it made in today’s Russia. A managerial-cum- entrepreneurial type, he is rewarded in the form of a moderne and swanky dacha on the outskirts of the city. He and his wife have invited some friends over and, while they quaff some choice wines, he cooks on a wok.

Then it happens. A local youth hurls a bag of rubbish into their enclosed back garden. The resulting confrontation with this man of lower economic status leads to Gleb’s wife getting slapped. Gleb responds in a rational manner by herding his party back into the dacha and away from further harm.

A spiral of descent on Gleb’s part ensues. He begins to watch instructional street fighting videos, start trying to lift weights beyond his capabilities at the gym, and takers up smoking again, roaming the streets to cadge a cigarette. Then he buys a gas gun….

True enough he does make some attempt to bring closure to the matter in a civilized way. He goes to speak in person to the miscreant and befriends the man’s wife. However, his own wife continues to feel under threat and his more hothead friends urge him to deal with this `gopnik` with less compromise. Soon the dividing line between his own behavior and that of his enemy becomes ever more blurred.

Clichés are eschewed: this is no Straw Dogs, despite some similarities. Even with Andrey Bugrov’s stormy score setting the mood, Like a Man does not revel in depictions of gratuitous violence.

In fact, there is – as they say – a lot to unpack here. What is foregrounded is the contradictory demands that a modern males face – still mired in his provider/protector role but not expected to display brute shows of strength -but there is also something here about the yawning chasm between the aspirational middle-classes and those who are less successful. Also, whisper it, but I found it hard not to view the film as functioning as some sort of parable concerning the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

In any case, despite problems I had with the language level, I was kept rivetted throughout the film’s 105 minutes and it has stayed with me since.

Sisters.

This proved a hard film to get to see. The showing was in a far-flung, vast shopping mall in which the cinema was not signposted. Then the cinema itself failed to advertise that they were showing the film. In short, I reached the booth as the opening credits were rolling. I was alone in the place.

Sisters (Sestri) released this November, constitutes a thriller laced with fantasy elements and was directed by Ivan Petukhov who is responsible for many comedies (and has worked with Uma Thurman). However, in 2020 he was inspired by the quarantines to produce Locked Up which revolves around similar themes of isolation that Sisters involves.Released by Baselev’s Studio/Magic Production Studio and Event Horizon Company, the film provides a meaty role to Irina Starshenbaum (Invasion, Summer,Sherlock in Russia). As well as being Russia’s sweetheart she is a known opponent of Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine. As `creative director` she also must have had a fair bit of input into the product.

Another old hand of stage and screen (who also can be seen in Summer) joins her: Nikita Efremov.

The action opens in media res with Anya (Starshenbaum without cosmetics and looking a little older than her thirty-years) attempting to flee from further physical abuse from her businessman husband, Andrey, with a toddler in tow. Later, after her husband has left for work, she discovers that she has been locked into her flat. Then, in her attempt to reach out for online help she stumbles on a sisterhood who offer assistance. This coven of once abused women hide horrifying powers. They have the means to turn the tables on toxic men with a spot of human combustion….

Throughout the film’s 110 minutes the pace is slow and the mood unsettling. As with Like a Man what we get here is a domestic drama zooming in on the reactions of the main players.

Despite it’s 18 + certification, the cruelty and physical violation that forms the core of the tale is kept off the screen for the most part. Efremov plays Andrey with restraint: he seems calm and even loving at times and yet somehow menacing throughout.

Sisters represents an exercise in ambience. It is a spectral ambience brought about by the interplay of illumination and shadow in the photography and a celestial score from Misha Mishchenko (known for his work with the band Evendice) which provides the nucleus of this state-of-the-art Art Horror project.

The film was released to coincide with something called The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the director’s own comments and the statistics about domestic violence put up on the screen as the story closes all suggest that this has pretentions to being an `Issue Movie`. They seem to be trying to do for domestic violence in Russia what The China Syndrome did for the American nuclear industry – that is, blow the whistle on it.

Sisters is, for sure, unsentimental about life in Russia right now yet I am not so sure that its intended message will seep through. Something more social realist than magical realist might have fared better. Then again, Gogol’s The Overcoat – a ghost story – raised the question of lower-middle class poverty in its time.

The bigger question is this: will those interested in the West ever get to see these important films now?

Lead image: Kinomail.ru