The Russian Film Symposium has
screened seven of director Aleksei Balabanov's ten films,
ranging from examples of art-house or auteur cinema to
blockbuster hits. Dead Man's Bluff most certainly
falls into the latter category. A comedy about corruption,
gangsters, and the quick rises and falls of fortune that
characterized Russia in the mid-1990s, Dead Man's Bluff
has not impressed film critics as much as it has tickled Russian
audiences. Russian soccer star Stas Mokhnachev supposedly wrote
the screenplay for Dead Man's Bluff on a bet. He brought
the script to producer and head of the STW studio, Sergei
Sel'ianov, who turned it over to Balabanov. The film was shot in
the course of one and half months. It premiered on 27 May 2005
in New York and opened one day later in Moscow.
This simple comedy of
errors revolves around two unreliable, trigger-happy mafia
lackeys, Sergei (Aleksei Panin) and Simon (Dmitrii Diuzhev).
Despite their tendency to botch every job, they are charged with
the task of exchanging a suitcase of
money for a suitcase of
heroin. News of the transaction spreads quickly among the
various criminal groups that roam the small city. Predictably,
the job is thwarted when three criminal hacks intercept the
narcotics shipment (though they would have preferred the
money). The remainder of the film focuses on Sergei and Simon's
search for and recovery of the drugs.
Humor in the film derives
less from the uninspired story than from the depiction of
criminal activity in Russia during the mid-1990s. Visual
representation of the era consists almost entirely of bad
haircuts (with a particular focus on
bangs); a variety of
unattractive jackets, ranging from the iconic raspberry-colored
sports coat of Russian mafiosi to the black trench coat of
thick-necked thugs; and a beat-up BMW. The gangsters' readiness
and willingness to shoot every living obstacle is more a display
of their buffoonery than of some sort of violent nature.
Characters die with comic theatricality—blood splatters, bodies
slump, heads drop to one side, and a final grunt escapes the
lips. The star-studded cast—including Balabanov-film regulars
Sergei Makovetskii, Viktor Sukhorukov, and Kirill Pirogov, in
addition to Renata Litvinova, Aleksandr Bashirov, Andrei Panin,
and Nikita Mikhalkov—creates some amusing caricatures. Among
these the aloof, but sexy waitress, the corrupt police officer,
and the cheesy mafia don are the most memorable.
Certain pieces of the
film's dialogue—made up almost entirely of short, caustic
remarks—have been compared to the highly stylized repartee in
Quentin Tarintino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Sergei and
Simon's discussion of the superiority of Russian bliny to
McDonald's hamburgers, in particular, has elicited comparison to
Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson's debate about whether pork is
or is not a dirty animal. Perhaps the most striking line in
Dead Man's Bluff is uttered repeatedly by the film's one
black character: "I'm not Ethiopian; I'm Russian!" To Russian
audiences, this apparent impossibility—to be both black and
Russian—is itself laughable, but his repetition of this line
also emphasizes his defenselessness against the endless barrage
of racist jokes hurled at him throughout the movie. However
un-PC, it is just these jokes that receive big laughs from
Russian audiences.
Aleksei Balabanov
Aleksei Balabanov was born
in Sverdlovsk on 25 February 1959. He made his directorial debut
in 1989 with the documentary Egor and Nastia. His first
feature film, Happy Days, was released in 1992 and won
instant fame across Europe. Since then, he has directed nine
films that have made it to the big screen (one project, The
American, was abandoned). Balabanov is championed as one of
the best contemporary Russian directors, whose films range from
blockbuster hits to art-house sensations. Balabanov presently
works at STW Film Company in St. Petersburg, which he helped
found in1994 with producer Sergei Sel'ianov.
Filmography
