A scene from the movie Luna Park
I recently watched two relatively old Soviet/Russian movies back to back, Taxi Blues and Luna Park, made by the famous Russian director Pavel Lungin, both produced in the early 1990s. Taxi Blues (1990) and Luna Park (1991) are critically acclaimed films from the late Soviet or early post-Soviet period, depending on how one chooses to interpret them.
Nevertheless, they both were made around the time of the Soviet Union’s demise and cut to the heart of the turbulent times – a period of political, socio-economic, and historic upheaval that was taking place as the U.S.S.R. came crumbling down. To me, these two films zoom in on individuals and their seemingly mundane lives (for the most part) during this epoch, but in the process tell us about the larger story and place the characters in the context of the times when the world as they knew it was changing.
This perhaps was not the intention of the director, but after 20 years these movies remind me of artistic time capsules and present issues that are very indicative of what a Russian citizen had to grapple with back then. Ironically, the ideas presented and issues raised in these two movies are topics pertinent in Russian society today, namely xenophobia and anti-Semitism as well as coming to terms with the Soviet past and what it means to be Russian. In short, Taxi Blues and Luna Park present problems indicative of the times they portray – an individual is left to figure out things for himself amidst a time period of profound sea change when his old worldview has been ripped out from his psyche, yet the themes are so contemporary in the context of present day Russian xenophobia.
Director Pavel Lungin, born in 1949 in Moscow, comes from a prominent Jewish family. His directing debut and screenplay for Taxi Blues, a drama/comedy, won the best director prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. I think the movie is rather difficult to understand not only for a foreign viewer, but even for a Russian who has not experienced life under the Soviet Union or is too young to remember the late ‘80s.
Taxi Blues is about a strange symbiotic relationship between a hardened Russian taxi driver Ivan (Vanya) Shlykov and an eccentric Jewish musician and saxophone player Liosha Selivestrov, who also has a major alcohol problem. The two meet when Vanya gives Liosha and his drunken buddies a ride, but Liosha lies and leaves without paying for a large cab fare. Vanya finds Liosha, takes his saxophone as collateral while in the process the two strike up an odd friendship together with Liosha ending up staying at the cabby’s apartment. Selivestrov is different from Shlykov – he wears western clothes, has a different manner of doing things and is often aloof, and plays a western instrument rare in Russia. At one point when the two of them are in Vanya’s apartment and are about to go to sleep, Vanya asks Liosha if he is Jewish. After Liosha answers yes, Vanya says, “I thought that Jews don’t squander everything on booze.” Selivestrov ends up owing even more money to Vanya because he floods a downstairs neighbor while taking a bath. Shlykov makes him work off his debt by performing all kinds of degrading physical labor from carrying bags at a train station to washing his cab. Vanya’s girlfriend is smitten with Liosha and his saxophone-playing skills which enrages Vanya, but leaves him feeling powerless and impotent. The movie ends with Liosha meeting a famous American jazz musician who takes him touring in the U.S. while Vanya is left angry, bitter and jealous of his friend and his successes even though Liosha continues to struggle with alcoholism.
Just like Taxi Blues, Pavel Lungin directed and wrote the screenplay for Luna Park. The drama was less successful, but won the Nika Award (the Russian equivalent of the Oscars) from the Russian Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences for its musical score, incidentally also written by a Russian-Jewish composer Isaac Schwartz. In brief, Luna Park is about a young man Andrei Leonov, a muscular skinhead type in charge of a gang of anti-Semites, xenophobes and homophobes whose aim is to cleanse and purify Russia of those they deem undesirable. The movie starts with a crowd of skinheads waving the Russian flag and fighting a biker gang who they think have succumbed to the western influence. These young men often resort to vandalism and violence including detaining homosexuals and beating up women. Andrei whose chiseled face looks typically Russian thinks that his father was a true Russian hero who was a killed in action flying a plane. To his horror and shame Andrei finds out that his father is really Jewish with a very un-Russian name of Naum Heifitz, a composer/musician by occupation who makes his living entertaining people at private parties.
As the movie unfolds Andrei’s feelings for his father overcome his hatred of everything Jewish and he hopes that his friends will accept his dad too, especially after Andrei warms up to Naum and sees how personable, charming, and talented his father really is. But the matriarch of the gang, Aliona, will have none of it. She threatens Andrei and wants to take away Naum’s apartment, but vaguely promises Andrei that nothing will happen to his father. When Andrei returns to Naum’s apartment he finds it ransacked and his father abducted. In horror he runs to the place where the gang has its headquarters in a small amusement park or Luna Park and saves his dad. The movie ends with Andrei and Naum getting on a random train and the two escape somewhere to Siberia to start a new life far from the capital and the gang.
As I already mentioned, the two movies present a historic and visual snapshot of the changing times in the late Soviet period. Despite the fact that Taxi Blues precedes Luna Park by only one year or so, the contrast between the two films is stark. Taxi Blues presents a picture of people dressed in clothes stuck somewhere between the ‘70s and the early ‘90s, Soviet clunky cars, a bare police station, an unsanitary butcher shop, Vanya’s dilapidated work-out equipment that looks like he made it himself and the communal apartment in which he lives. The movie starts as any old Soviet movie would – we see the red flags everywhere and the large Cyrillic letters that spell out C.C.C.P. (Russian for U.S.S.R) are lit up on buildings on the main avenue in Moscow. In contrast as the story unfolds we notice Liosha wear western clothing and play a saxophone. He ends up going on a tour with American jazz musicians, making Vanya, epitomized as an average Russian man, jealous and helpless. Because of this visual information that includes the introduction of sparse western images (a sex doll, the movie also has a sex scene) intermittent with Soviet symbols, the viewer knows that the story is set in the Soviet Union, albeit in the late ‘80s when it was already on its last leg.
Luna Park on the other hand is clearly an early post-Soviet movie. The streets, communal apartments, the stores, cars, amusement parks are just as run down and dilapidated. Naum stands in line to buy kefir and tells his communal apartment neighbor that there are no eggs to buy unless he lays one for her. He refuses to go to the hospital in a Soviet/Russian ambulance. Despite the general poverty (and of course the transition years were just as cold and hungry), there is a lot of symbolism both verbal and visual that sets this movie apart from the Soviet era. First, the language itself differs from Taxi Blues. When the skinhead gang was conducting a trial in the basement over a homosexual boy they caught, one of its members said that “taking into the consideration perestroika and humanism” he is going to go easy on him. Naum suggests to Andrei to start a “co-operative”, a form of semi-private business that boomed right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The word “AIDS” is mentioned three times in the movie, a taboo topic in the Soviet times. There are several scenes with computers.
Both Taxi Blues and Luna Park deal with a painful topic of anti-Semitism in Russian society. It is not unlikely that Taxi Blues is one of the first Soviet movies to openly address this subject. Its main character Vanya, and some might disagree with this view, is overtly anti-Semitic. I argue this not only because of his mental preconceptions and stereotypes that only get solidified as his relationship with Liosha develops, but also because he openly chastises Liosha stating that he has to learn to work hard just as Russians do. The Jews were hated and discriminated against in the Soviet Union, but they were never openly assaulted which we see happen in Luna Park.
Luna Park is very much a movie about a struggle for a post-Soviet and now a new Russian identity. With the collapse of any kind of authority right after the fall of the Soviet Union, gangs and racket groups had free reign on the streets. I think it is more or less clear why in Luna Park we see a gang of young men who are committing crimes unpunished whereas this might be lost on a younger generation. In a way Pave Lungin portrays a scenario in which xenophobes takes the matter in their own hands – their only solution is to resort to violence and heinous crimes. The movie portrays the absurdity and the sadness of the situation in which Andrei and his father end up. Naum is a productive member of society, a composer whose songs even the gang members know and is undisputedly part of the intelligentsia whereas the “true Russians” are nothing but a group of criminals. Aliona’s words are similar to what Vanya says to Liosha in Taxi Blues. She says to Andrei, “Who is a Russian man in Russia? A Russian man in Russia is a clown.”
Taxi Blues and Luna Park represent a continuation of the same theme, namely the old stereotypes and prejudices ingrained in the Soviet mind that have not disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but instead transformed themselves during the perestroika period and continue to live on today. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed many people became lost as they realized that they have been living a sham for the past seventy years. They had nothing to fall back on but their suppressed fears and primal emotions. There was resurgence in neo-Nazi and racist groups that commit crimes against non-Russians specifically targeting people from the Caucasus and blacks. Today, the topic of xenophobia and anti-Semitism is very much apropos in Russia. Even relatively recent Russian movies such as Brat and Brat 2 openly embrace ideas and portray images that are completely unacceptable and offensive to Jews and Ukrainians and everybody in between.
Watch the Taxi Blues trailer below:
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Watch watch the opening scene from Luna Park below:
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