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 Aleksandr Veledinskii's Russian, loosely
based on Eduard Limonov's autobiographical trilogy (We Had a Great Era,
Adolescent Savenko, and The Young Scoundrel), narrates the life
and deeds of a young poet, Eddie (Andrei Chadov), first on the streets of
provincial Kharkov and, later, after he experiences unrequited love and a
failed suicide attempt, in the city insane asylum. In this remote Russian
counterpart of Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975),
the protagonist develops his poetic persona in a psychiatric ward, which
turns out to be, if not the safest, at least the freest place in the
entire city and, possibly, country.
In the course of the film, the
sixteen-year-old protagonist desperately tries to escape the life choices
available to him in the provincial town. If Eddie follows the career of
his father, he will turn into a secret police officer. If the protagonist
follows the example of his street buddies, he will turn into a criminal.
The rest of the characters seem to serve the narrative's major goal: to
assist the protagonist in articulating an identity beyond the two options
that Russian reality offers to everyone else. The quest for the
protagonist's identity determines the narrative structure and mise-en-scène
of the film. Provincial Kharkov seems to have two centers. The first
center is city's official Soviet downtown with the standard monument,
cops, and a grocery store selling primarily vodka. The second center turns
out to be the local mental institution, the metaphysical, paradoxical
locale organized conceptually by the logic of misalliance—between
insanity and wisdom, incarceration and absolute freedom. The space of the
insane asylum expands ideologically rather than geometrically and extends,
at one extreme, to the heavenly summit of the Orthodox belfry and, at the
other, to the criminal underworld.
According to this bewildering logic of
finding one's identity by losing one's mind, the protagonist is
committed by his own mother (Evdokiia Germanova) to the insane asylum that
turns out to be not just one more psychiatric ward but the famous insane
asylum, Saburka—the school of geniuses, from where Mikhail Vrubel,
Vsevolod Garshin, and Velimir Khlebnikov emerged to the ranks of immortal
prophets. Two other geniuses hover over the patients-students of Saburka:
Sergei Eisenstein, whose October (1928) they watch on the asylum TV
set, and Richard Wagner, whose music from Twilight of the Gods
accompanies the screening of October. Most importantly, the music
is not part of the film's extra-diegetic soundtrack but, rather, the
subjective diegetic one—accessible to the fools-in-wisdom, but not to
the presumably normal doctors, nurses, and the rest of the city population
beyond the walls of the loony bin.
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