Retro trash

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

Published: May 27, 2005 (Issue # 1073)

For The St. Petersburg Times Dmitry Dyuzhev (l) and Alexei Panin (r) star with a host of Russian stars in Alexei Balabanov's crime caper "Zhmurki."

Zhmurki," a new film from Alexei Balabanov, is perhaps the first Russian trash film about those "who survived the '90s." Think Quentin Tarantino meets Guy Ritchie in Nizhny Novgorod.

Unfortunately, the film lacks the jokes and little gimmicks of those directors, and that's why, even with its all-star cast, "Zhmurki" is no masterpiece. The film is unlikely to have any significant influence and is instantly forgettable.

The name of the film, "Zhmurki," is the Russian word for Blind Man's Bluff, the children's game where someone blindfolded tries to catch other people. The name only makes sense at the end of the film when the main characters, gangsters, shoot other gangsters one by one, as if in a game. But a near-pun on zhmurki in Russian is zhmurik, meaning corpse. Any set-up or storyline before we get to the inevitable scenes of corpses is a superfluous sequence of killings, tortures and gang's fights.

Two gangsters (played by Alexei Panin and Dmitry Dyuzhev), who work for the local mafia boss (Nikita Mikhalkov in a blond wig), fight over a suitcase of heroin with competing gangs, a local police officer, neighbors, and almost everyone else they meet on the way.

The funniest part of film (which is described as a "criminal comedy" by the producers) is the endless shedding of dozens of liters of blood (more than 50 liters of "blood" were used during the first days of the shooting of the film).

At one point, a medical student and a punk try to perform an operation on one gangster's stomach using his studybook as a guideline.

In the meantime, Balabanov has managed to collect one of the biggest team of famous Russian actors assembled.

Other stars in the film include Sergei Makovetsky, Viktor Sukhorukov, Andrei Merzlinkin, and even the celeb Renata Litvinova, first playing a waitress in a local bar and later a secretary to the "new politicians" the gangsters become after they have concluded the heroin job. Most of the actors play cameo roles and get killed off, and none of the characters has enough time to win the viewer's sympathy.

Balabanov has traveled a strange route to get to this "criminal comedy." He is well known for his two his "Brother" films which, on the one hand, reflected and documented the degradation of Russian society in the 1990s, but on the other, contributed, through their immense success, to that same process. Balabanov actually began his career with art-house films, including "The Castle" (1994) and "About People and Monsters" (1998). Later on, after "Brother 2" in 2000, he directed "War" in 2002 about the consequences of the Chechen war and the unfinished film project "River" (2001-2002) about the life of Yakut people, the shooting of which stopped because of the death of the actress playing the main role.

Having tried himself in various genres, Balabanov has persisted in creating films that form opinions and generate discussion.

With "Zhmurki," however, this won't happen.

The '90s are over, and the epoch of remembering them - with praise or anger - is also disappearing.

"Zhmurki" is running in the Avrora cinema, and in all other cinemas from June 2.