Bill O'Driscoll, 2002
Olga, Masha and Irina are three sisters whose names, at least, are literally straight out of Chekhov. But while in Chekhov's century-old play the three were provincials who yearned for the big city, in Aleksandr Zel'dovich's novelistic 2000 film Moscow, they are already there.
Olga is a doll-like, emotionally unstable young nightclub singer. Masha is a student engaged to a gangster who aspires to bankroll the rebirth of Russian ballet. Irina, the eldest, is in debt and in a long-term commitment-less relationship with a man, much of it spent drunkenly reminiscing about their youth as writers' children in the black-market 1970s.
Moscow – occasionally baggy but more often provocative, and bracingly cinematic – opens with aerial shots of the lush, verdant countryside, perhaps evoking the Chekhovian past; it ends with rhyming scans of unlovely modern Moscow rooftops. In between it probes the contemporary bourgeoisie, seemingly free to live but apparently with little to live for. It's only the most recent look at Russia's uncertain soul in a Carnegie Museum film series titled "Imperial Fatigue."
Alone among the old European empires, in the 20th century monarchial Russia didn't become a nation-state: It was supplanted by a different kind of empire, a socialist one. Broadly, the four films in the series give four views of Russia belatedly trying to achieve nation-statehood at a time when that term is increasingly difficult to define.
"What we're interested in is the ways in which [in the films] you can see the whole imperial structure become fatigued," says Nancy Condee of the University of Pittsburgh, who organized the series with her husband, Pitt associate professor of Slavic languages and literature Vladimir Padunov. "You can see the country begin to pull apart."
The series also includes:
TAXI BLUES. Padunov says this 1990 film about the relationship between a culturally conservative cabbie and a bohemian Jewish musician is landmark cinema. Taxi Blues was produced before the Soviet Union's official breakup in 1991. But as arguably the first film to document the rupture between a Soviet identity and a post-imperial Russian one – whatever that might be – it was highly controversial.
"Everyone in the Soviet Union refused to talk about it as a Soviet film," says Padunov, who with Condee visits Russia several times a year. The film's director, Moscow-born and -educated Pavel Lungin, "was referred to as a French director. It was so clearly [foretelling] the end of the Soviet Union."
THE MUSLIM. Vladimir Khotinenko's 1995 film explores identity from the point of view of an outsider: a Russian soldier named Nikolai who after the war in Afghanistan returns to his native village and is considered a traitor because he has converted to Islam. The futility of the Afghan invasion presaged the dissolution of the Soviet empire; meanwhile, the character of Nikolai, says Condee, represents a composite Soviet identity, one that struggles with its internal complexities.
KHRUSTALEV, MY CAR! Perhaps the most intriguing entry is Aleksei German's 1998 film set just before Stalin's death, and against the backdrop of an anti-Semitic campaign by Stalin's secret police. In the '70s and pre-glasnost '80s, German was an important reform-minded filmmaker whose work was often censored or suppressed. Padunov calls him "an auteur filmmaker of the highest order."
With its wildly busy deep-focus compositions and complicated sound design, Padunov says, Khrustalev is a challenging film that confounds expectations of a conventional narrative. German's disorienting approach famously prompted mass walkouts at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. But later the film was acclaimed; critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called it "brilliant, grim and madly intractable."
While German consorts with the demons of the Soviet past, in Moscow director Zel'dovich finds in the present only splinters of hope: The film ends with its characters visiting the city's unknown-soldier monument, seeming to pay homage to history but with only the vaguest notion how to go forward.
Pittsburgh City Paper