Crime, Punishment and Hangover – Weekend
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According to unconfirmed reports, in the summer of 2023, more than 35 film groups were working simultaneously in St. Petersburg and its environs. They shot full-length films and, of course, TV series, many of which will be released next year, adding to the already rich list of films that exploit not only the rich St. Petersburg nature with its rivers and canals, white nights and historical buildings of varying degrees of decay, but also in all, the rich myth of the place, the features of the “St. Petersburg text,” as literary and cultural scholars call this phenomenon. Let’s try to figure out what this text looks like and the stereotypes it generates on the screen.
The magnetism of St. Petersburg as a unique topos, not only influencing plots and characters, but giving birth to them, is undeniable. It is nurtured both by the city residents themselves and by those who are accustomed to visiting the banks of the Neva only from time to time (with reverent love or sincere amazement – how is it even possible to live here?). Filmmakers from post-Soviet Russia made a significant contribution to the creation of this image. The crumbling, permeated with the spirit of decay, but at the same time aesthetic “Lenfilm” gave birth to “Streets of Broken Lanterns” in the nineties. The film adaptation of the works of Andrei Kivinov, which aesthetically developed the achievements of the betacam adaptation of another sensational pulp fiction called “Russian Transit,” turned into the main series of the post-Soviet period. Then there were “National Security Agent” and “Gangster Petersburg” based on Andrei Konstantinov – and the stigma of Russian Chicago from the city on the screen was no longer torn away. “The cultural capital,” as Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin called St. Petersburg, taking away the federal television frequency from the city, acquired the status of a criminal capital.
A somewhat oxymoronic, but vivid combination of culture and crime defines the screen myth of St. Petersburg to this day. Just look at what and how TV series are filmed here. Even the new version of Fandorin’s adventures condemns its hero to visit both vernissages and murder scenes with equal frequency. It cannot be said that there were absolutely no historical grounds for the formation of such an image – after all, one of the most important literary works for local myth-building today is the novel “Crime and Punishment.” On the same pages you can find out what it’s like to “drink in St. Petersburg.” The atmosphere of deadly revelry and alarming hangover generated and carefully maintained by drunks is the third of the most important St. Petersburg stereotypes.
Well, the principle of the triple unity of the incompatible, as the poet Alexander Skidan rightly pointed out in his essay on the St. Petersburg text (“On the benefits and harms of St. Petersburg for life”), is already revealed in the very name of the city – St. Petersburg. Three languages - Latin, Greek and German – criminally collide in one word. How not to drink from such cultural self-will? On the screen, this St. Petersburg triad looks quite attractive, as it effortlessly generates the plots necessary for the small screen. This was first noticed on TNT, where seven and a half years ago the not very popular, but bright and accurate “Poor People” brought together in a typical St. Petersburg apartment an equally typical, apparently for St. Petersburg, divorced neurotic writer played by Dmitry Lysenkov and a small drug dealer (Maxim Filipev). For the three of them, a visiting folk dance performer (Lina Mirimskaya) helped them drink, who immediately settled into a striptease bar (here they are, those very night entertainments of the Northern capital that tourists from Moscow talk so much about).
The recent “Bow,” where a talented conservatory student (Mark Eidelstein) between classes played at underground sex parties and laid out bookmarks with illegal substances, was no less skillfully combined with low, and became so carried away that he founded his own drug empire by the end of the series. It’s funny, but almost simultaneously with “Smychk”, “Chimera” was released on another platform, where a brutal drug control policeman, played by Alexander Kuznetsov, dealt with the same darknet in St. Petersburg. “Chimera,” in addition to its criminal themes, also successfully exploited the St. Petersburg myth of shabby central gateways and melancholic bourgeois suburbs. In addition, it seems that it was in this series that for the first time the industrial outskirts dear to the hearts of St. Petersburg residents were captured with such care: the port, the Western High-Speed Diameter (one of the most beautiful roads in modern Russia) and Kanonersky Island.
The latter invariably makes an indelible impression on filmmakers with the highways and interchanges laid above it at an unattainable height, which makes the isolated piece of land on the edge of the Gulf of Finland look like footage from a futuristic anime. It’s not for nothing that the main character of the science fiction series “Samsara” wakes up there, on the Gunboat. It would seem, what should a successful gentleman played by Pavel Derevyanko do in this not very well-groomed, complex (at least from a logistics point of view) area? But beauty and cinematic passion for drama, which, of course, sometimes also has visual forms, requires sacrifice from the hero. St. Petersburg beauty on the verge of dysfunction and decay – or, rather, a dramatic myth about it – inevitably drives a Muscovite to the Leningradsky station, to the Sapsan, like the heroes of Valery Todorovsky’s love story “On the Top” – Alexander Petrov and Danil Kozlovsky. What are they looking for in St. Petersburg? Plot? A drama that is impossible in Moscow? The city of dreams is ready to help – after all, this is a space that from birth lives with traumas and comprehends itself through them.
It is worth noting that the slogan of the above-mentioned “Samsara” – “Tomorrow will be yesterday” – is extremely appropriate here, “on the shore of the desert waves.” The city is imbued with a history that paralyzes its inhabitants (at least those seen on screen), forcing any new experience to be interpreted through the experience. St. Petersburg is always an injection of retro. Even if it’s retro, rooted in the immediate past. As, for example, in the sarcastic noir “1703”, where a young caricatured Moscow hipster with crusts and a pistol (Kuzma Saprykin) gets an experienced senior detective Kolpakov (Gosha Kutsenko) as a partner – along the dark streets of the city of white nights they move naturally under Tanya Bulanova, stuck on autoplay in the car radio. The Neva flows, but time has stood still in St. Petersburg. This is daddy’s city.
The past in St. Petersburg gathers like a dark cloud over the hero’s head, there is a lot of it here. You don’t have to look far for examples. The fascinating plot of Daria Gratsevich’s new series “Black Cloud”, invented, it seems, without an eye to the St. Petersburg texture, was made fully viable by the radiation of the local myth. The legendary St. Petersburg atmosphere filled the thoughtful script moves with additional content. “Black Cloud” begins with the death of a nasty old woman. The police suspect a gloomy student played by Maria Matsel, who is dealing with the baggage of traumas in the luxurious apartment of an intelligent psychotherapist. But immersing yourself is dangerous: the anger, everyday irritation and depression of a small person condenses on the screen in the form of deadly black smoke. Isn’t this view of the ecology of the St. Petersburg spirit too crazy? – the viewer has the right to ask. But here, in these interiors and exteriors, which combine signs of comfortable bourgeoisness and total devastation, on the streets along which Dostoevsky and Gogol walked, you can believe in any devilry. Here a gate opens to another world, from which unkempt fairy-tale heroes come to Pot from “The King and the Jester,” eager for dismemberment and other serial St. Petersburg amusements.
Every year the myth about the city of total darkness and its inhabitants soaring in the clouds, lost in their fantasies, becomes stronger. And all the more valuable are the attempts, albeit curious, to destroy the stereotypes of perception of St. Petersburg. From time to time they are also undertaken by our cinema. One of the latest is the final season of the capital’s Kept Women. It’s amazing – taken outside the Garden Ring and Rublyovka, this series suddenly turned into a complete phantasm: yachts, villas somewhere on the islands of the Malaya, Middle and Bolshaya Nevka, neat greenery, a woman mayor (in St. Petersburg there is a governor, but that’s okay), everything in white – go find something like this in our penates. It would seem that this is not a city, but a fairy tale, live and be happy. But even here, the very first episode ends with a murder – and the St. Petersburg plot quickly takes its toll, embarking on a cultural-criminal track, well lubricated with alcohol. What summer, what yacht? There is only “night and silence, given for a century, rain, and maybe snow is falling.”
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