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| Courtesy of Mosfilm |
Opening on an underground Russian rock concert with people
dancing in Yalta, we meet curious and open minded Bananan (Sergei “Afrika”
Bugaev) who functions as one of the drummers.
There his path crosses with Alika (Tatyana Drubich), a very young nurse
who has formed a romantic relationship with her middle-aged patient Krymov
(Stanislav Govorukhin), a intellectual bookworm who in actuality runs a
criminal group overseen by dim KGB agents.
Unbeknownst to Krymov, Alika and Bananan quickly form a tight friendship
that borders on romance as he introduces her to Soviet counterculture including
but not limited to showing off his musical hero Nick Cave.
Interspersed throughout the story is a period historical subplot
involving a history book Krymov is reading about the assassination of Tsar Paul
I of Russia (read onscreen by author Natan Eidelman), forming a parallel between
the events of the past and present timelines.
After Krymov catches the two a bit closer together than he'd like, the
criminal elder starts thinking very seriously about murdering the young boy who
threatens his dominance over Alika, implying a symbolic tug-of-war between old
and new Russia.
An experimental musical dramatic film odyssey told in
episodic anecdotal form before boiling down to a symbolic allegory for the
then-seismic political changes happening in Russia, Assa whether you
approach this with knowledge of Russian history or not remains one of the most
powerful movies ever made at the tail end of the Soviet Union. Freely working in everything from
experimental instrumental music by Aquarium front man Boris
Grebenschikov as well as working in a number of Russian rock performers
including Bravo, Yury Chernavsky, Vesyolye Rebyata and most notably Kino
featuring Viktor Tsoi, Assa’s soundtrack when it isn’t veering into
increasingly somber fare is a raging firestorm of needle drops. To see Assa first and foremost is to
hear the film and what it is saying with its songs.
Shot on the Crimean-peninsula by renowned and legendary
cinematographer Pavel Lebeshev of The Ascent and Hard to Be a God,
the film looks extraordinarily beautiful even as it starts to wade through heavier
emotional fare. Take for instance the opening
and closing musical numbers which feature everything from multicolored lights
to strobing to glitter, transporting you the viewer into the Russian
underground rock scene. It has the
feeling of exhilaration and excitement before pulling back in and out of dreary
prisons, squalid houses barely afforded by its central characters and a wealth
of scenery overlooking Crimea’s waters. This
isn’t just a film with ornate cinematography, however, it frequently uses
editing and superimpositions in a way that feels hip and at times stoking a
little bit of Stan Brakhage.
The performances across the board, from Russian performance artist
and painter Afrika as the film’s hero Bananan to Stanislav Govorukhin as the beleaguered
and jealous mafioso to Tatyana Drubich as the innocent girl being torn between
the young and the old, are all excellent.
But it’s Viktor Tsoi in a choice cameo predating his work on The
Needle that brings the house angrily down, forming an emotional and
sociopolitical ironclad fist.
If Bananan
represents the ordinary young Russian citizen being trampled upon by the rules
of the old Russia represented by Krymov, then Viktor Tsoi playing himself in
the film’s most famous and unforgettable scene is the logical culmination of
those two extremes seen in microcosm. So
ferocious, intensely physical and charismatic is Tsoi’s performance in this
movie, performed only at the age of twenty-four, it imprints itself into your repertoire
almost immediately irrespective of your background or political leanings.
Filmed over two months followed by another eight just to get
it approved, Assa was initially misunderstood by the first viewers who
dealt with it…then it became a countercultural symbol many credit with being
contributory to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For writer-director Sergei Solovyov, the film
became the first installment of a trilogy of like-minded films tackling
similarly controversial but important fare such as Black Rose – The Emblem
of Sorrow, Red Rose – The Emblem of Love and House Under the Starry Sky.
For the underground Russian rock music scene
where Kino initially recorded most of their albums illegally, to have it catapulted
right into the face of mainstream moviegoers was kind of shocking if not really
very cool for its time and place. To a
western filmgoer still wading through the countless iterations of eastern European
art, Assa is a metallic baseball spiked home run that might make you
bleed a little but will leave you feeling refreshed if not deeply moved. Simply put, one of the greatest Soviet films
to emerge as the Union itself started to see itself ending.
--Andrew Kotwicki
