Saturday was Russian Culture Day at the Flaneur. In the evening would be a Yuri Bashmet concert, but before that was a matinee of Aleksey Balbanov’s 1997 film The Brother. This kicked off a retrospective of this post-Soviet director’s work which will run until the 25th May at the Mayfair Hotel on Stratton Street.
‘It’s hard to believe there are many who haven’t seen this film,’ said the website blurb, but there was at least one person in the leather seats of the basement cinema for whom The Brother was a new experience. The précis I had read suggested it was going to be a dark thriller, but two young boys were sitting in the back row with their family and as I sat waiting for the lights to dim a young girl in a pink jacket skipped in. Unusual audience for a harsh thriller I thought, maybe it’s not as brutal as I imagined.
Sergei Bodrov in The Brother
It is, but most of the violence happens offscreen. Still, most pink-coated skippers I know would probably prefer The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists! Danila, a young man who has just left the army is berated by his mother for not being as successful as his brother Viktor who lives in Leningrad. No, St Petersburg. No, Peter. Danila, played by Sergei Bodrov heads to Peter to stay with Viktor, who greets him with suspicion and a gun to the head. It turns out very quickly that the brothers’ mother would probably not be so pleased with Viktor’s success if she knew that he was in fact a violent hit man.
If I knocked on my brother’s front door and was greeted with a pistol to the head – well it’s not something I could accept without comment. However Danila finds it unsurprising, and is soon helping Viktor out in the matter of ending other people’s lives. He shows no emotion, no remorse and gives no sense of having suffered any kind of dilemma. If anything he is glad to help out, seeing himself as a modern Robin Hood. His ethics are skew-whiff – he helps a tram’s ticket collector collect a fine, but does it by threatening the free-loading traveller with a gun.
The images have the retro quality of VHS, drab colours bleached out, details indistinct, as though a hipster has applied a 1972 filter to the entire film. St Petersburg still looks stunning and has been added to my must-visit list. It is known as the Venice of the North – like most cities that are are north of Venice and have a river – but here the designation actually appears apt. It does though look a bit nippy, I recommend visiting in summer.
Balbanov makes no attempt to hide the depravity in this 99 minutes examination of a drifting, brutal underclass. Justice is a different animal to that in the UK. ‘You broke his arm,’ says a policeman at the start of the film. ‘If you were drunk I’d arrest you,’ he adds, letting him go. Black eyes and broken lips are commonplace. Anti-semite opinions are muttered. Women are not idolised. Danila’s love of music humanises his character slightly, but he is always an outsider on the fringes of society.
The Brother documents a disturbing way of life where crime is just a means to get the latest CDs. It has several scenes fetishising guns and the making of home-made bombs but does show the horrendous conditions in which the homeless have to survive and the nasty way they are treated by others.
In 2000 Balbanov revisited the characters, and Brother 2 is also showing as part of the retrospective. Other films lined up include Of Freaks and Men, War, It doesn’t hurt me, The Stoker and Me Too. Welcome to the Academia Rossica and to the work of an iconic Russian director.
Visit the Academia Rossica for more information about the Balbanov retrospective
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