EPIC FAIL
Six lessons from Russia’s new crop of historical dramas
By Brian Droitcour

Why is Russia’s nascent movie industry so taken with the historical epic? Perhaps epic-making is a necessary phase—Hollywood took half a century to grow out of swords and sandals. Perhaps it’s a hangover from Soviet cinema, which was heavy on “respectable” costume dramas, literary adaptations and World War II movies. Or maybe it’s simply because Russia’s two biggest homegrown box-office hits in 2006 fit the genre, and producers spent the next year and a half trying to replicate their success. (Those were 9th Company and Turkish Gambit, respectively a grim drama about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and a mystery set during the Crimean War.) Last year brought three big-budget epics. There was 1612: Chronicle of the Time of Troubles, about an ordinary guy who thwarts the Polish armies that controlled Russia during the messy interregnum between the Rurik and Romanov dynasties. Then there was Servant of the Sovereign, the story of two French noblemen sent by Louis XIV to report on the moves of the Russian and Swedish armies during the Great Northern War. And we may as well include the Oscar-nominated Mongol, made by Russian director Sergei Bodrov and financed by Kazakhs, about Genghis Khan’s rise to power. There are more on the way: get ready for a native take on Gogol’s Cossack classic Taras Bulba. The thing about historical films is that they, unwittingly or deliberately, provide a snapshot of the current national mood; you learn more about the Bush-era U.S. from Hollywood’s Troy, for instance, than you do about Homer’s Troy. So it is here. Despite the differences in setting, weaponry and haberdashery, all next-gen Russian epics share a certain worldview.

 

1. Chechnya Aside, War Is Pretty Cool
War is the only way to tally up a respectable body count in a setting that predates Kalashnikovs. The winning side doesn’t seem to matter much to moviegoers: one would think that 1612 and Servant of the Sovereign would be popular because they were about Russian victories, but they were far less successful than 9th Company and Turkish Gambit, which were about the times the Muslims won.

2. Real Men’s Names End In -Ka
The big heroes of 1612 are not Prince Dmitry Pozharsky or Kuzma Minin, the men immortalized in a monument on Red Square for driving the Poles from the Kremlin. (The movie has just a few shots of Pozharsky stroking his beard, while Minin doesn’t even get a cameo.) Instead, credit is given to the fictional Andreika, a former servant to the family of Tsar Boris Godunov who witnessed the Poles murder his bosses and was then enslaved by them. Clearly, Andreika has his reasons for wanting vengeance, but we get the impression that he wouldn’t get far without his phantom fencing coach (the disembodied head of a Spanish pirate) and a unicorn talisman around his neck. With a little magic, Andreika gets so good at turning the Catholics into kielbasa that the Russian people want to crown him tsar, but then Mikhail Romanov steals his superdelegates.

While the main characters of Servant are Frenchmen, the one we are supposed to like more, the handsome Pierre, is redeemed by the friendship of Grishka. Again with the -ka, which is the bad-ass diminutive–distinctly working-class but not as simpering as, say, -ushka or -en’ka.  Grishka is a peasant, natch, who rose through the ranks of the Russian army. After the Frenchman saves his life, Grishka invites him to his native village, conveniently located between battle zones. Sleeping on hay and sweating in the banya makes a real man of Pierre, who used to laze around playing bridge and twirling rubies in his moustache. Which brings us to the next point.

3. Foreigners Are Gay
The decadent  West  vs. the robust East is a recurring theme in Servant, a movie that juxtaposes a ménage à trois in the Sun King’s court with rape in rural Russia. Peter the Great may have aspired to Westernize his officers and gentlemen, but that apparently took a few generations to set in; all Russians in Servant are a coarse, manly bunch, a strong contrast to the wig-wearing French. These movies provide a useful flip side to Hollywood’s 300, where the Eurasian guy was the one lisping.

At the start of 1612, False Dmitry, the first Polish puppet-tsar, prances into the Kremlin wearing a carnival mask. (Only a Russian director, it needs to be said, would depict a Pole as a debauched Westerner.) Two minutes later, we see the Russians using the mask to scoop the Pole’s ashes into a cannon and shoot him back west. And Genghis Khan brings down the Torgut empire to the west of Mongol hunting grounds. Its capital has lots of drugs and jewelry, the Torguts apparently being the trust-fund hipsters of medieval Central Asia. 

4. Girls Are To Be Rescued And Not Heard
Besides drawing dates to the cinema, the female love interest provides flimsy motivation for a variety of onscreen stunts. As a pubescent servant, Andreika spied on Princess Ksenia Godunova bathing nude. (The woody it gave him would alter the course of history.) Time and again, he risks his neck to save her from the Poles. But it’s unclear whether Ksenia really cares; in the end, like any respectable orphaned and deposed princess, she joins a convent. The heroine of Taras Bulba looks as hapless as Ksenia, only more pregnant. At least Borte, Queen of the Mongols, is a tough broad, but what else would you expect from a woman who wanted to marry Genghis Khan?

5. History Is In Books, And Books Suck
It’s no secret that movies about historical events tend to tart up the facts by inventing minor details. Or an entire storyline. Right, Oliver Stone? Despite the backdrop of the Great Northern War, the plot of Servant is pure fiction, as is the subplot about the winsome Polish partisan who keeps failing to assassinate Peter the Great. This whole C-plot seems engineered so that, when the assassin finally gets caught, the tsar gets to say the line, “Hang the bitch.” As for 1612, it runs down six years’ worth of facts in an intertitle-laden ten-minute introduction, then promptly begins making up pirates and unicorns. Yes, unicorns.

6. Patriotic Sentiment = Big Bucks
The Russian historical epic of today aims, above all, to assert a new national identity that predates and transcends the Soviet Union. This is clearest in the case of 1612, whose release was timed to coincide with the November 4 holiday, established in 2005 to commemorate the day the Poles were expelled from Moscow. (Though the main reason was to eclipse the anniversary of the October Revolution, on November 7.) The Russophobes out there will assume that the Kremlin ordered director Vladimir Khotinenko to make 1612 on pain of death. But while the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography ponied up a few rubles for production, the bulk of financing came from the private sector: these paeans to Russian glory are, more often than not, individual oligarchs’ unsolicited love letters to the Putin administration. 1612 and its unicorns, to stick to one example, were bankrolled by the country’s No. 3 oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, the same man who spent $100 million to bring eleven Faberge eggs from the Forbes collection back to Russia. There’s one problem, though: Kremlin Brownie points don’t translate to box office success the way they once did. Last year’s three epics each made about $6 million, or roughly 60 percent of their budgets.