Mosfilm: Intergirl (1989) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Mosfilm

Years before becoming a renowned film writer-director in the Soviet Union, Ukrainian born filmmaker Pyotr Todorovsky (father of filmmaker Valery Todorovsky) worked as a cinematographer for the Georgian born auteur Marlen Khutsiev.  Starting out as co-cinematographer with Spring on Zarechnaya Street before working his way up towards directing his own features, Todorovsky eventually directed the 1983 drama Wartime Romance which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, the last Soviet film to do so.  In between those projects, three years separating each one, Todorovsky went on to do the free-spirited musical Through Main Street with an Orchestra before embarking on effectively his most popular and perhaps his most controversial work up to that time: the 1989 Leningrad prostitution perestroika Intergirl.
 
Adapted from Vladimir Kunin’s 1988 novel of the same name based on studies of the activities of prostitutes in Leningrad hotels, Intergirl concerns Leningrad based nurse Tanya Zaitseva (Elena Yakovleva) who works under the radar at night as a prostitute servicing foreigners for some extra cash.  One night she receives an unexpected marriage proposal from a wealthy Swedish client named Edvard Larsen (Tomas Laustiola) who promises to set her up for life.  That doesn’t stop her from being accosted by cops after her and several other prostitutes in the region are arrested, sending Tanya home to her mother Alla (Larisa Malevannaya) who has been estranged from her runaway husband and kept in the dark about her double life thinking Tanya is just a nurse. 

 
Despite Tanya’s secretiveness, she invites her new fiancée Edvard over to meet her mother and dreams of life in the Western world.  However, things get in the way like Soviet government demands she receive permission from her estranged father to immigrate.  Upon meeting back up with her father Nikolay (Vsevolod Shilovsky), the boozing loser demands lots of money in exchange for his signature, driving her back into prostitution to make ends meet.  Needlessly to say, things don’t improve for her when she finally does make it to Sweden, gradually turning into a downward spiral reminiscent of Assa and Little Vera where all the facts and figures eventually come back full circle to haunt our beleaguered heroine.

 
A Swedish-Russian co-production originally commissioned by authorities to debunk the Western American dream, so to speak, with Todorovsky chosen over his softness with comedies, the film shot between Russia and Sweden on location went on to become one of Mosfilm’s first movies made without state funding.  With clothing flown in from Sweden by the costume designer Alina Budnikova, Intergirl was perhaps the first time the subject of Soviet prostitution had been introduced into the mainstream cinematic consciousness.  Becoming the most popular Soviet film of 1989, something of a Cinderella minus a happy ending, the film went on to win numerous international awards such as lead actress Elena Yakovleva winning the 1990 Best Actress Nika Award.  In Japan, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival.  

 
With a soft spoken original score by Pyotr Todorovsky himself and lensed handsomely in 1.33:1 by Air Crew cinematographer Valery Shuvalov, Intergirl presents a splendid looking and sounding portrait of a complex woman trying desperately to stay afloat in an arena of increasing challenges.  Elena Yakovleva who made her debut in Plumbum, or The Dangerous Game rises to the occasion and difficulties of dramatizing and shooting scenes of sex and/or nudity at a time when such a thing was taboo to even talk about let alone film.  Equally strong in supporting roles are Tomas Laustiola as her new husband whose Swedish friends will not let either of them live down her past life in prostitution and Larisa Malevannaya as her innocent and hopeful mother who is kept in the dark about her daughter’s livelihood, for now…

 
The most popular film of the 1989 Soviet Union, with around 41.3 million viewers whose popularity ingrained the word and title Intergirl into national repertoire, it was nevertheless controversial with many authorities decrying even photographing the topic and putting it on movie screens.  While the movie is rather tame about the waters it wades into with scant nudity onscreen and several implied rather-than-shown sex scenes, it nevertheless was a shock to the system for many moviegoers and Soviet film critics.  Many would later attribute Intergirl, believe it or not, with contributing to the downfall of the Soviet Union, a rather absurd claim for a surprisingly modest nonjudgmental character study of a then-very real problem in the country.  Whatever your feelings are on Russia or prostitution, Todorovsky’s epic two-and-a-half-hour drama joins films like Ken Russell’s Whore as a stark reminder of the hardships and often tragedies endured by the lives of sex workers.

--Andrew Kotwicki