Welcome to the Leningrad of the early Eighties and the bands of the Rock Club that emerged there. Part biopic/docudrama and part musical, this monochrome film which opened in Cannes last May to much fanfare, concerns the (fictionalised) life and times of Viktor Tsoi, lead singer of Kino and Mike Naumenko the vocalist with blue-rock band Zoo Park.
These `U.S.S.R punks` were smitten with Western rock and so, uniformed in denim and shades, tried to live for the moment, swigging wine and puffing cigs in the way they imagined their Western counterparts had done 15 years earlier.We see them haggling over Western rock posters in markets and getting hassled by old-timers on train journeys.
Many of their elders indulged them, however, and the Soviet authorities let them play their stuff – most of it on acoustic guitars and recorded on reel-to-reel tape recorders –provided it was their own work. We can be thankful for this edict because the music of Tsoi’s Kino is as timeless as it is Russian, even though nudged a bit by the likes of Joy Division.
It seems somehow fitting that many of these artisans, Tsoi and Naumenko included, were to die young just before the Soviet period, which they had chaffed against, drew to a close.
He has brought the Russian rock star’s restricted milieu to life by use of quasi-avant garde flourishes. Leto features hand painted graphics, on screen lyrics, and abrupt vaudevillian rock turns the songs of Talking Heads, Bowie, and Iggy Pop.
Real life rock vocalist Roman Bilyk (of power-pop group Zveri) takes the role of Mika Naumanko and does so with able nonchalance. The difficult task of becoming the iconic Viktor Tsoi fell to the Korean-German actor Teo Yoo who had to say his lines in Russian despite not having any of that language!
However not even the addition of Irina Starshenbaum (Attraction) as the object of a love mix-up involving Tsoi and Naumenko, can disguise the fact that Leto is formless and overlong, (in particular if one is not fluent in Russian).
What saves Leto is its stylistic playfulness some of which even startled me, and of course the music proves enlivening, although I would like to have heard less of the old Western party pieces and more from Kino.
This film resembles Aleksey German’s film Dovlatov from earlier the same year.Both films brood over the well-known problems of earlier times. Perhaps it is time for Russian film makers to look forward.