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Twenty-year-old Pavel has come back from the
war in Chechnya with visible and invisible scars. He has lost an eye, and
believes he is surrounded by menacing "spooks" (dukhi,
which is also a term used by Afghan and Chechen war veterans for the
indigenous enemy fighters in those conflicts). Pavel arrives in Moscow not
only to be fitted for an artificial eye ("I'd like a diamond
one," he says), but also to find his father, Iulik, a
physicist-turned-popular-science-author with a happy, middle-class,
nuclear-family life who is unaware that an adulterous fling two decades
earlier had produced a son.
Iulik's family and friends react to Pavel's
arrival in a variety of ways that comprise a microcosm of societal
attitudes towards traumatized veterans, a contradictory mix of gratitude,
aversion, admiration, and fear. Iulik himself is initially in denial that
he is Pavel's father, but eventually defends Pavel's increasingly
dissociative behavior, ostensibly out of patriotism as much as
paternalism. Iulik's wife, Rita, at first urges her husband to take
responsibility for his progeny, but soon demands that Iulik leave the care
of Pavel to a military institution, out of fear for the safety of her own
children. Their teenaged son, Egor, is mistrustful of Pavel from the
beginning. Only Ania, their young daughter, accepts him completely, an
ongoing allusion to the scene from James Whale's Frankenstein
(1931) in which the misunderstood monster bonds with (though soon
accidentally kills [!]) a little girl, as well as to beauty-and-the-beast
narratives more generally. Another association with Mary Shelley's gothic
classic is more abstract: the tendency of scientific progress (including
military science) to outpace a society's moral development, with often
tragic consequences. The film's title also evokes Aleksei Balabanov's Brother
(1997), whose protagonist is another Chechen War vet struggling to find a
place in civilian society. Balabanov's Danila Bagrov, however, is able to
do so only within the emotionally superficial confines of the action
genre. In this respect, the first Rambo film, First Blood, attempts
to negotiate a generic position somewhere between Todorovskii's
contemporary drama and Balabanov's shoot-em-up.
In its complex engagement with the uneasy
relationship between the front and the home front, My Stepbrother
Frankenstein follows Todorovskii's other cinematic contemplations of
the experience of misfits in Russian society: Jews (Love), the
hearing-impaired (Land of the Deaf), and the less-definably
anomalous Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, a mini-series produced
by Todorovskii in 2003.
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