Russian Film Festival 2008

We sat awkwardly in the back, suddenly robbed of the secrecy and anonymity of speaking Russian. All around us there flitted shreds of truncated Russian gibberish, tainted by the familiar broken syntax of immigrants who now think purely in their adopted language. At last, members of the Russian cultural nobility assembled far in front. Two bored-looking Russian models, presumably Shaknazarov’s actresses or dates, posed reflexively in response to camera flashes as a series of speakers shambled over to have their pictures taken with them. Some of them paused at the microphone to issues speeches to the waiting public, the content of these can be summarized as a sort of congratulation for everybody who turned up on the night: “Look how culturally aware you are! Look how lucky we are to have this screening. What a great day this is for foreign film!” At last, the director approached the podium and spoke in beautifully, stereotypically accented English. “Your job is to watch the movie” he reminded us. “I just hope it is not a waste of your time”. Karen Shakhnazarov is a fifty-five-year-old director, one of Moscow’s finest, a member of local government, and a filmmaker since the early eighties. Since 1998 he has been the general director of Mosfilm, the 20th Century Fox for Russian cinema. During the 1970s, he was kicking around Moscow, a university student training to become a film director, under the guidance of Igor Talankin (another famous Russian director, the span of whose filmmaking experience exceeds that of the cold war). Shakhnazarov is not easily pigeonholed into a genre. Among previous achievements we have musicals (“We are from Jazz”, 1983), comedies (“American daughter”, 1995), historical drama (“Assassin of the Czar” 1991) and so on and so forth. Unlike many of his peers, he is not given to wildly lurching into sex or nihilism. To my memory, he has never made a film of the "chernuha" genre, of which Lilya Forever is a representative example; he doesn’t seem to hate people enough for that. Shakhnazarov’s was not what one would call a “difficult” childhood. Everything you needed was provided for you; the country was wealthy, its enemies were terrified, and there was no heavy demands upon you other than to attend occasional lectures and chase girls. Young Karen probably only did the latter, as he wasn’t really into cinematography at this stage. He took the course to get a basic arts education, so he could apply to the faculty of Visual Arts (his major talent was painting). This time must have seemed like a rosy dream. His father was Georgy Shakhazarov, a WW2 veteran, political scientist, editor of Politizdat (a government-run publishing firm, similar to our Oxford Univerity press), and author of the giddily successful The Bourgeois State in an Age of Imperialism (1955), who was at this point busy becoming a politician (he was ultimately one of Gorbachev’s full time advisors). Needless to say, young Karen had pocket money. This film, “Vanished Empire”( Исчезнувшая империя), is the twelfth film by Shakhnazarov. It is in essence a nostalgic retrospective trip, the daydream of somebody from my mother’s generation, about a time when the country had some very solid certainty about its place in the world. There is a story of course (and not a bad one) but it plays second fiddle to the setting. There is a dry comedy wrapped around the characters, and there is none of the misanthropy one might find in a film about the post-Soviet times. There are drunken peasants, but neither violent nor thuggish- just your common collective-farm oafs, chasing geese around. There are elements of what one might call “regime themes”, a’la soldiers in khaki trenchcoats , but at no point does anybody give even the slightest impression that they are struggling beneath the oppressive yoke of Communism. Indeed politics remains a remote thing, as far from the centre of the plot as it would have been for a teenager of the time. Politics in those days was limited to vaguely knowing that the West has nicer clothes than what you find ‘round here, and for some reason the Party Leaders wont let us have the new Rolling Stones record. The movie is an archaeological expedition into a world which has now been destroyed. Its title is perfect. There is no stylized fanfare, no political agenda, no attempt to darken or illuminate- it is a faithful reproduction, a museum exhibition. In this sense, it holds interest for somebody with my completely dissolved sense of cultural identity, who has no real impression of what the world of my parents was like. And unlike other films of the genre, it does not attempt to paint this period as a stagnant, dirty time. However it is certainly directed to interest those, the few, who actually experienced it. I expect anybody who had ever had to check the stitching of contraband jeans for authenticity would have shed a tear. This film is not recommended for Russian children under 40.