Tag: Dystopias

Daydream trippers.

REVERSIBLE REALITY is an all too plausible glimpse of the future but offers no surprises – however, it is as timely as hell

The teaser for this `fantasy thriller` enjoins us to picture a world where you can -among other things -`settle scores with a hated boss…all without consequences`. Indeed, in the dark but comic opening scene an overwrought employee does just that. The street below his office gets littered with the corpses of his repeatedly vanquished boss in his virtual fantasy.

Dmitry Konstantinov, the 57 year old director-cum-screen writer responsible for Reversible Reality (Obratimaya Realnost) has a history of involvement in crime thrillers. For all its being set a few decades hence and tickling us with some wacky science, this is another one.

This 84 minute film got a 12+ certificate release this year, two years after its completion. It incorporates noir elements alongside a boardroom thriller within a science fiction framework. Some bankable actors have added the icing on the cake by adding their names to it. Heartthrob Pavel Chinarev provides the lead and the multi-award winning Timofey Tribuntsev (The Island, 2006) makes a great theatrical bad guy. Meanwhile the alt-pop outfit Mojento lay on some musical interludes.

Virtual addiction.

The film is a glimpse of a hyperurbanised Russia of tomorrow. Here Virtual Reality know-how has advanced to the degree where pundits can immerse themselves in interactive parallel realities.

A Virtual Reality corporation called New Life has found itself riding on the crest of a wave of demand for its services. Citizens are content to vegetate in their free time, with what are called `Adventures`, tightrope walking across a gorge, scoring a goal for a major football team and so on instead of hiking and dating.

Blissed out commuters enjoying their Adventure.[En.Kinorium.com]

However, glitches are starting to appear and these sweet dreams are starting to become more like nightmares as a cell opposed to virtual living have found a way to hack into the system. Is the grand scheme of New Life in jeopardy?

Cybercop.

Enter Mihail (Chinarev). A specialist in online crimes, he gets tasked with infiltrating New Life as an employee and to seek and destroy the `antivirts`. Suspicion has fallen on one Vika, an employee of the company who commits such flagrant breaches of propriety as reading hard copy books on the metro (Zamyatin’s We, no less!)

Pavel Chinarev is Mikhail [Torrent].

Mikhail though is soon mesmerized by Vika’s gamine charms. With her as his new squaw he begins to uncover New Life corporation’s dastardly plot to extend its powers. (They are even confiscating people’s household pets the better to minimize any competition with their Adventures!) In the process the boss of the corporation is clubbed to death – or so it seems – and the fingers all point to Mikhail.

Vera Kolesnikova [Mobilelegends.net].

This multilayered whodunnit is rolled out with a fast pace and much talk. The septic New World was one that I haver seen countless times before – not least inBladerunner with its nocturnal cityscapes overseen by vast video displays. The technological marvels of it are kept to a wise minimum – although the downloading of Mikhail’s mind into the body of the boss – will play a part in what transpires.

Fifty costumes were designed for this show. Their sleek quality adds to the general texture of the film as do the transparent computer screens. The virtual reality appliances are represented by a bar of light hovering before the punter’s eyes.

The actors seem to be doing their own thing, but in a good way. Chinarev is a fisticuff trader whose bedroom features models of motorbikes. Tribuntsev acts his socks off as the despotic CEO (as well as others who come to inhabit his body). Vera Kolesnikova (100 Days of Freedom, 2018) is doll faced and impassive and it is easy to see how Mikhail could become spellbound by her. We also get a cheering cameo from Vladimir Yumatov who plays a seedy antediluvian sleuth given to announcing his presence with a loud blowing of his nose.

Old World Futureworld.

Overall this conformist and automated anti-utopia took me back to Hollywood films from two decades back such as Equilibrium and Minority Report (both from 2002). I found this to be a bedrock of reassurance. The theme explored here is a very old one (one could go back to Huxley’s `feelies` in Brave New World from a century ago) and one far from reassuring, but the film engages with it in a style and format I could relate to with ease.

Promotional poster [mix.tj].

About time.

The appearance of Reversible Reality in the cinemas seemed like an answer to a call. The news is full of stuff about how Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality scheme – Meta – is faltering owing to over-investment and people are losing their jobs because of it. Perhaps you and I are not so willing to trade in our old real lives for new virtual ones. Perhaps, like Mikhail and Vika at the close of the movie, we would rather be sitting on an actual boat floating down an actual river on an actual summer’s evening. In an interview for Kinoteatr.ru Chinarev commented:

` After all, we look into the monitor screens more than we do each other’s eyes`

Postscript. I have received news that the release of Hamlet Dulyan’s long awaited adaptation of Evgeny Zamyatin’s influential dystopia WE has yet again been cancelled. (It was supposed to reach cinemas on December 1st of this year following many delays). No reason has been forthcoming. This echoes the cancellattion of the release of the film EMPIRE V (From the Viktor Pelevin novel) last March.This represents a disturbing new trend in Post February 2022 Russian cultural life.

The lead image is from Mobilelegends.net

THE BYKOV CHALLENGE: Living Souls.

Russia's Catch 22   serves up a spicy goulash combining social satire, poetry, science fiction, magical realism, and polemic. Can YOU take it?`

[Alma Books Limited]
 `You should call me Comrade Major, you’re in the army aren’t you? Have you forgotten your rank? `

`No I haven’t comrade Major. `

I know I’m Comrade Major.`….

 

`I didn’t just turn up, Comrade Major, I came at your request -`

`I know I called you, I’m not senile! ` Evdokimov interrupted him loudly. `Do you think we’re all senile in Smersh? Answer me!`

`Not at all, Comrade Major`

`Not at all what?`

`Not at all senile in Smersh Comrade Major`

`How do you know what we’re like in Smersh? Perhaps you’ve been here before?`

 

This farcical interrogation appears in Living Souls, a state of the nation novel about Russia by Dmitry Bykov – an ebullient figure who has become a public intellectual, one of the last living representatives of the fabled `intellegentsia`, through his poetry and biographies. He will be fifty-two this year, and this novel came out in 2006 (as `ZH.D`) and was translated four years later.

Poet of dissent: Dmitry Bykov  [Litschool.pro]
At 433 pages long it is a Brontosaurus of a novel which provides a panoramic odyssey through post-communist Russia.

Tomorrow’s world.

However, it is a Russia of an unspecified future. This is a nation which has broken up into two ethnic tribal groups locked in a weary civil war.

There are the quasi-Hitlerian Varangians who consider themselves to be the descendants of the Vikings and the Khazars who are made up of Jews and of Muscovite liberals. Opposed to both of them are a smaller, forgotten lost race who espouse a Tao-like approach to life which worships polarity and cycles.

Having discovered free energy in the form of `phlogiston`, the rest of the world has no need for Russian oil. No longer able to sell it, the Russians convert their black gold into foodstuffs. The government, moreover, has imposed a tax on the use of certain words hence journalists have to invent their own, and homeless people are diagnosed as suffering from `Vasilenko syndrome` and are available to adopted as pets in middle class homes.

Citizen’s tales.

Against this pessimistic backdrop where everything, and religion in particular has been militarised, a number of characters play out their own stories. These are told with great meticulousness and often through intense one to one dialogues.

There is an army general cohabiting with a native from one of the captured villages, a Varangian journalist in love with a Jewess and a young girl accompanying a homeless person. All of their fates are bound up with the fabled village of Degunino, to which they make their way….

Bringing it to the West.

Cathy Porter is a very experienced translator, but when it came to bringing this difficult novel out in English she worked alongside Bykov. They had to jettison some of it, but the gritty yet lyrical evocation of the vastness of old-new Russia remains. Bykov clearly loves the damp forests, dusty cabins and rundown villages of his homeland and that is why he is so critical of it. `You almost have to be Russian to read it`, complained a British reviewer in the Financial Times (April 6th, 2010).

 

The satire recalls Kafka and Burgess but it was the British poetess Elaine Feinstein who made the most memorable comparison: `A Catch 22 for modern Russia` is how she described it. Indeed, readers Joseph Heller’s rambling comic novel will find the same sense of the absurdity of military life in these pages.

Big Russian read.

Should you get the urge to devour a Big Russian novel then – aside from the obligatory War and Peace –the obvious choices are between Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) which evokes the Bolshevik uprising and its aftermath and Solhenitzyn’s Cancer Ward (1970) which concerns the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras. Living Souls completes the next step by offering a chronicle of modern Russia, or be it through the prism of a dystopia.

I am enough of a glutton for punishment to have read this novel not twice but three times. The first attempt was on a twelve-hour stopover at Frankfurt airport where, with the help of much German Weisbeir, I got a sense of the novels power. The second time I read it more slowly and in dribs and drabs and I was rewarded by getting more of its humour.In the third slog I could savour the different chunks of meat and vegetable in the goulash I was gorging on. Like Russia itself, Living Souls is worth persevering with in the end.

 

Living Souls by Dmitry Bykov (Translated by Cathy Porter) is published by Alma Books Ltd, UK.