After the café, Sasha and Stepan headed home, and the rest of us went off for a walk around the city. The Russian conception of “going for a walk” is very different from the idea of going for a walk for Americans. In America, the word “go” requires a “somewhere,” a destination at the end of it. Even if young people walk through the streets of New York or Boston, it usually is to a specific destination. In Russia, young people gather in groups of 3 or 4 and simply wander, “gulyat.” Gulyat is an interesting word because it means to go for a walk, but it can also mean to go out on the town, have a fun time, or in general walk in a sort of wandering manner without a defined end point. The culture of “gulyanye” is especially visible during holidays in Russia, when entire cities are out on the sidewalks and roads, especially around New Years, or other big holidays. This whole culture of gulyanye is also aided by the fact that in Russia you can carry open containers of alcohol on the street (technically there is a law against it but policemen don’t enforce it). As a result, going for a walk sometimes means bringing a couple of bottles of beer along – a sort of dynamic version of the more stationary American “Budweiser and lawn chair in the backyard.”
While we were walking, I was struck by a prime example of Soviet architecture across the street. This grey movie theatre had all the elements of a classic Soviet building, a boxy-constructivist shape, gray cement walls, strange modern images set into mosaic panels, wide steps made out of a patchwork of multi-colored oddly shaped stones, and on top of it all (literally) the sign for the building, (usually a word that is either excessively abstract or mind-numbingly commonplace such as “Re-awakening” or “Soviet”), in a font that is marked by its thick and elongated lettering (apparently popular back in the 50’s). It turned out to be a movie theatre, and perhaps its architectural genius was what called us to it and inspired us to watch a movie. There wasn’t really anything interesting playing, so the girls chose a random Russian movie called “Nevesta lyuboy tsenoy” or “A bride of any price”.
This was probably the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life. Ever. The basic storyline of the film was the following: young successful businessman playboy in Moscow, works in advertising at cat-food company, deserves to get promoted, but 40-something woman who is philandering with the CEO will be promoted instead unless he does something about it. So young successful businessman playboy decides to reach out to Russian mafia boss to invest in their company, and since he is smooth, he secures the deal to ensure his promotion, but since he is a playboy, he sleeps with the Russian mafia boss’s wife. Russian mafia boss’s bodyguard sees him leaving the building of Russian mafia boss’s apartment, and Russian mafia boss vows to kill young successful businessman playboy when he returns to city in 1 day. Young successful businessman playboy has to prove that he was visiting someone else in the entryway, so decides that he has to get engaged to someone in the same entryway by the end of the day or else he is toast. So he goes with stereotypical office computer nerd to find people from the apartments of the entryway and try his skills at quick engagement, ends up that the final girl that he tries to get engaged to falls in love with the inept computer hacker nerd instead. In the end, young successful businessman playboy is about to get killed, one girl pretends that she is his fiancé, they get “married”, and the film ends with young successful businessman playboy running away from his own wedding reception with another girl, because the marriage was a sham anyway to continue the lie for the Russian mafia boss.
Ultimately, for a journey whose main goal is to experience that which is around me, no matter what the circumstance, whether it is a pleasant or unpleasant experience, it is all valuable, because it gives me yet another experience to think about, and another perspective on life, and life in Russia in particular. As a result, while the film was one of the worst I’ve seen, it was one of the most interesting I’ve seen from a cultural perspective.
When one sees a film like this, or even reads its synopsis above, the easiest story-line to read into it would be that this is yet another example of the morally corrupt West intruding into Russian culture and ruining its youth. However, I would contend that this film is a perfect example of something that is neither “Western” nor “Russian. It captures perfectly the absolute nuclear disaster that occurs when artless producers attempt to graft what they consider to be “Popular American teenage culture” onto and into the contemporary popular culture of a different nation (in this case Russia) in order to introduce a new level of “cool” for its audience. The result is something that seems ridiculous and foreign both to its intended domestic audience and to Americans.
The first problem with this approach is that the artless producers (American or Russian, who knows who made this movie) who attempt to create such MTV/Hollywood trash look-alikes have no conception of present-day “American popular culture” and how it operates and is received by the American public. I don’t think that they understand that there is a difference between Seinfeld and Big Brother, between Family Guy and Beavis and Butthead, between Old School and Kung Pow, Rocky and Rocky 5, the Godfather and Godfather 3, Back to the Future and Back to the Future 3. The Simpsons, popular in Russia as well, are popular in America not solely because of its unique design and witty comedic lines, but because it is a parody of the regular working man and all his stereotypical defects. It is not just a comic strip with a bunch of dumb jokes, it has a point. Since I didn’t have a TV growing up, I never watched the Simpsons, and even now have seen very little of the Simpsons. When I did start to watch a few episodes, I was struck by how warm and cuddly it got towards the end of every episode, there was always a makeup between Marge and Homer, some sort of moral to be learned. I was expecting more of a raw, smart alecky, fast-moving rebellious thing that my parents wouldn’t be able to stand. If one were to compare this “Bride of Any Price” movie to the early 90’s American movie “Liar, Liar,” we’d see the difference between being funny, and crossing the line and being trash. A Jim Carrey classic, there are countless scenes of Jim Carrey making faces, acting like a crazy man, and plenty of potty humor jokes. However, all things considered, the movie doesn’t quite cross the lines of decency: in the end it’s about Jim Carrey changing his ways and becoming a better family man. In the end we all go home happy, we were able to laugh at a few crude jokes, and we leave the theatre glad that Jim Carrey came around to being a decent guy.
The second mistake of the producers of this movie, beyond not only not understanding the nuances of American popular culture, was that they crudely and artlessly applied this improperly understood Western model onto a foreign (Russian) setting. All of the elements of the story, the characters, the conflicts, the comedic sequences, were straight from Hollywood, but they were completely improperly understood and applied. The cat-food company “board-room scenes” were the typical portrayal of the Western Company setting, except instead of being a regular board room, the room looked like a space control center from Star Trek, with flashy windows, funky colors and glass tables everywhere. I didn’t get whether they were trying to parody “new capitalism” or glorify it somehow. The main character was a wise-aleck fast-talking Jim Carrey type, they even gave him a couple of Jim Carrey-like monologues of quick-moving banter in which he made fun of his colleagues and slickly dealt everyone and everything around him a flippant set of words. But everything was overdone, from the typical ignorant boss being over-acted to the point of ridiculousness, to the obviously excessive sexual content. If all of this were done as a parody of the emptiness of the young “Moscow” generation, the whole movie might have been funny, it would have made for plenty of laughs at the shallowness of the character, etc. However, the movie did the complete opposite, it portrayed this “Moscow young businessman” as the epitome of cool, and tried to get laughs as we watched him slice his way through fumbling and bumbling corporate bosses and computer nerds. It would be equivalent to “Liar, Liar” being made up entirely of its actual first half, in which Jim Carrey is mean and sharply critical of everyone around him. Unsurprisingly, I seriously started to despise this actor after about 10 minutes. Even after he supposedly “learns his lesson” about love when the computer nerd wins one of the girls, the movie ends on a positive note for him as he both successfully evades death at the hands of the Russian mafia boss and continues his prior philandering ways. Unlike “Liar, Liar,” and many American movies, Russian movies tend to end on the more depressing and realistic note of “we’ve followed the development of this character for 1 ½ hours, and while we’d like to tell you that he’s a new man and that that climactic scene with the sunset and the fields and the peasants had a big effect on him, he, like the rest of us, cannot change himself fundamentally, and he has returned to his prior way of life.” American movies tend to be uplifting, they tell us that morals can be learned, lives can be changed, people can be transformed. Are Americans too naïve, and too easily fall for picture perfect Disney endings? Do Russians have a more sober grasp on life as it actually is? Or is it simply that America is a place where dreams come true, and Russia is a place where the roads never get fixed?
Not only was the film itself interesting to watch, but it was also interesting to observe the reactions of those I was watching the film with. After all I had come to the movies with members of an Orthodox Youth Group, and the film had turned out to be something much different than expected. Awkward laughter turned into the desire to switch halls to watch another movie, and then the decision to sit tight and gut it out. As we were walking out of the theatre I asked Ksenia what she thought of the movie. Ksenia is a university student studying interior design, a really friendly, shy girl who seemed to be a bit more traditionally minded and modest than the rest. She had seemed to laugh the least, if at all, during the course of the movie. In an incredibly shy and touching way, she responded to my question very delicately, searching my eyes for a sign of what I thought myself, not wanting to hurt my feelings if I had liked the movie, “It wasn’t my favorite” she said grudgingly. When I told her that I really didn’t like the movie at all, she then quickly agreed, “I didn’t like it much either.”
I obviously don’t take this film to be an indicator of the state of Russian film-making, as much as I take “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle” as an indicator of the level of American film-making. However, it is a good example of the kind of empty commercial film-making that neither uplifts its audience, nor is made with any kind of purpose other than to play on the base interests and desires of humanity to make a pretty penny. Ultimately, I think it is neither an “American” phenomenon, nor a “Western” phenomenon, nor a “Russian” phenomenon, but simply a negative phenomenon that regular Russians and Americans alike can unite against.
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