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Financed by one of Russia's largest distribution companies, Central
Partnership, Anna Melikian's feature debut is lavish, playful, and
conspicuously derivative. A boxer from Moscow, Boris (Antikiller's
Gosha Kutsenko), gets off the train at the provincial town of Mars,
named for the author of the "Communist Manifesto" but missing
the letter "k" on the train station logo. The Mar(k)s pun
is essential for the film's style, which shifts between absurd comedy and
melodrama, between Karen Shakhnazarov's City Zero (1989) and the
colorful fantasies of Amélie. Supersized plush animals peek into
the traincar windows, peddled by the town's inhabitants, whose salary is
paid in this "soft currency."
The camera, circling the gigantic, cellophane-wrapped statue of Lenin,
recalls Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935).
Boris meets characters who have come straight out of Dmitrii Astrakhan's
nostalgic reveries: a precocious, scheming girl and her mother, both
dreaming of a French suitor; a young idealist, Grigorii, in love with an
ethereal librarian Greta (played by "Miss Tbilisi," Nana Kiknadze),
whose daily routine includes watching Casablanca in the local movie
theater; and a barmaid fantasizing about a sexual encounter with Vladimir
Putin. This cultural mêlée is overlaid with a haunting soundtrack by
Aleksei Aigi (who wrote the music for Valerii Todorovskii's Land of
the Deaf [1997]) and a ballad, written and performed by Gosha Kutsenko
himself.
Mars has a commendably simple plot, which seems to have been
borrowed from Lermontov's "Taman'": a jaded visitor from the
"capital"
comes and leaves, disrupting "the peaceful life" of a Crimean town. At
the heart of this plot, however, is the Holy Trinity of post-Soviet
cinema: dream, desire, and displacement. Everyone wants to escape her or
his predicament. Mar(k)tians dream of abandoning the provincial paradise
and getting to Moscow (or even better, to Paris or New York), while Boris
is on the run from Moscow, from his boxing career, and from his mobster
boss. In contrast to the plethora of recent Russian films about the
(post)-imperial identity crisis, Mars is not nostalgic. Dislocation
and yearning are not pitched against any temporal, spatial, or cultural
"norm." The visual series of the film largely consists of dream
sequences, film inserts, flashbacks and flash-forwards. With its somewhat
somnambular characters, Mars points to social and individual
psychosis, but renders it as an aberration "without a cause."
Unlike her teacher's use of head injury as a psycho-political
metaphor (see Sergei Solov'ev's Tender Age [2000]), Melikian's
central metaphor is color blindness, introduced at the beginning of the
film. For instance, Boris' violent flashbacks to skull-crushing boxing
matches are shot in black-and-white, contrasting sharply with the brightly
hued sequences in Mars. In an interview, Melikian remarks that she belongs
to a generation of "wounded people," incapable of enjoying simple
things. If the plush fantasy of the first half of the film provides both
the mise-en-scène and the visual therapy for this aberration, the second
half turns the grotesque comedy into a melodrama. At the film's end
Greta, who had committed suicide, is resurrected by Grigorii's
power of love ... and art: Greta floats through the empty town as a
cinematic version of Marc Chagall's flying figures, escaping reality.
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