Issue #14/95, July 20 - August 3, 2000  

Hey Mud People, Itth a Fethtival!

Well, boys and gals, my visa is set to do its annual expiration thing again, which can mean only one thing: it's time for another Moscow International Film Festival (number XXII, for anyone besides the organizing committee who's counting).

Anywhere else, this would be a genuine cause for, if not excitement, then at least some degree of cinematic interest. And this should be all the more true in a place like Moscow, where the range of non-Hollywood cinema shown is not always exactly terrific. But leave it to Russia's ruling class of Sovok bureaucrat-artistes to ruin what should otherwise be a very good thing indeed. The number one reason why the Moscow film festival sucks has nothing to do with the lack of attention-worthy foreign guests or even the program of films shown. Indeed, even during its leanest years in the mid-to-late 1990s, there were at least a dozen or more potentially interesting films on display.

Rather, the problem is one of language—more specifically, the dubbing v. subtitle issue. These days, when even the lamest failed summer blockbuster gets the benefit of a fairly professional dubbing job, the Moscow film festival continues to rely almost entirely on live synchronized translation into Russian—usually done by some old geezer with a head cold and a low-quality omni-directional microphone. Even assuming the Russian is comprehensibly audible (which is not always the case), a good thirty-three and 33/100 percent (if not more) of the cinematic experience is thereby lost. Granted, this may not matter much with a crap-fest like Battlefield: Earth, but a film by, say, Mike Leigh (as in this year's entry Topsy-Turvy, a surprisingly good musical biopic about British musical comedy groundbreakers Gilbert and Sullivan) is another story entirely. That is, unless you're one of those bastards who think the music and background sounds aren't important, in which case fuck off.

Of course, the Moscow film festival is an unwieldy group effort—with timing issues, competition with other international festivals, and political and diplomatic disputes at least partly to blame for the aforesaid general low quality of translations. But still, there's one face in particular at the heart of it all, and when that face belongs to a character as hateful and despicable as Nikita Mikhalkov, it's very tempting to place all the blame squarely on his shoulders. Which is exactly what I intend to do.

And not just because he was the number two man on then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's NDR party list in the 1995 State Duma elections (giving up his seat to some even more faceless bureaucrat once the election was over).

And not because he accepted roughly $10 million in state budget funds (payment perhaps for the above service) to make his abysmal Titanic-a-be The Barber of Siberia—a compendium of grand Russian cliches the likes of which has not been seen since a Great Anglo-American director last filmed a bloated screen a adaptation of one of Tolstoy's longer novels. And not because he allowed this film to have its premiere in Kazakhstan, where he is cushy with local tyrant Nursultan Nazarbayev and even appeared together with the tyrant in posters for his most recent Presidential campaigm (Nazarbayev was reelected in a landslide, of course—in one of those "relatively fair" democratic contests which, aside from oil, have become ex-Soviet Central Asia's most dependable industrial product in the last decade).

And not because he was filmed on Russian TV kicking a pair of teenagers (who had already been physically restrained by Mikhalkov's security goons) who had the temerity to throw eggs at him to protest the director's aforesaid political "activities" in Kazakhstan (the two teens, both members of our own Edward Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party, spent many months in Butirka prison, where one of them caught tuberculosis—a virtual death sentence in today's Russia).

And not because of his cushy relationship with ugly, bald, and ultra-shady tycoon Boris Berezovsky, or because of the bushy mustache he wears—or even because of the high-pitched, scratchy voice he affects in all of his interviews.

No, these are all but discrete problems that are indicative of a more serious root problem: Mikhalkov is simply a conscious-less and amoral child of the Soviet elite. Having grown up amid relative material comfort and rampant hypocrisy, he has learned to profit both artistically and commercially (in his own limited way) from never having a fixed moral compass.

Thus, while acknowledging that his Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun was a superb film (deft even in its handling of the hyper-melodramatic subject matter without giving it a maudlin quality), I find it difficult to take Mikhalkov's anti-Stalinist stance therein any more seriously than his ludicrous cameo as stuffed-shirt czar Alexander III in The Barber of Siberia.

And in a way, by taking the Moscow film festival seriously, you'll be toadying up to the Mikhalkov just as he has toadied up throughout his life to whomever were the current powers-that-be. Which would make you as self-important and selfish as Mikhalkov, albeit on a rather more petty level.

But just in case you're not fleeing town like me for the next ten days, see to the right for a purposely brief guide to a few of the festival films that it might be worth your while to check out, notwithstanding the above caveats.

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