To be afraid to run – Weekend
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“The Boy’s Word” is launching on several platforms at once. Blood on the Asphalt” by Zhora Kryzhovnikov is a series about the harsh late 1980s and boys rapidly growing into manhood in typical Kazan microdistricts, based on the book by Robert Garayev, an important study of the “Kazan phenomenon”. Long before the premiere, the series began to be reproached for romanticizing the criminal world and sympathizing with the boyish ethic. However, these accusations should be held back.
1987, Kazan. In the “Little Vera” and “Assa” cinemas, in the “Tender May” and “Kino” tape recorders, but local schoolchildren have more important problems than sex education or the changes that the hearts of informals demand – street violence and daily extortion. Two eighth-graders – modest Andrey, the favorite of his exhausted mother, and poor student-hooligan Marat – at the behest of their English teacher, converge in a kind of friendship with elements of sadomasochism. While Marat (Ruzil Minekaev) humiliates Andrei (Leon Kemstach), accustoming the nerd from the music room to swearing, cigarettes and fights, he not only shows amazing tolerance for beatings, but also seeks to pump up his pitiful social capital. In the yard he is a non-starter, a “chushpan”, and friendship with Marat, whose older brother (Ivan Yankovsky) before his military service in Afghanistan was a smart kid in the area named Adidas, is a chance to join the local “office”, the youth group “UKK”, and to get at least some protection from the extortions of Iskander’s well-fed former friend.
During the years of perestroika, much was said about the “Kazan phenomenon” of the 1980s – clashes block after block and armies of teenagers beating each other half to death – and with understandable lyrical anguish. And not only in the central Soviet press. Even the overseas The New York Times at one time published a dry article about youth gangs of the autonomous Soviet republic. The scale of the phenomenon was impressive. Robert Garayev, who three years ago published a documentary study called “The Boy’s Word” in the publishing house Individuum. Criminal Tatarstan 1970–2010s,” wrote about about a hundred street gangs – the largest of them had three hundred fighters. Garayev’s book, which gave the series its name and theme, is the most detailed story about the “teenage plague,” as perestroika journalists in Kazan itself called this social phenomenon. Anyone who, after the release of the series, wants to know more about the life, morals and entertainment of urban youth in a dying empire should be directed to this work.
Zhora Kryzhovnikov, despite the closeness of his characters to the testimony of Garayev (the author himself is recognizable in the pianist Andrei), is, of course, not a documentarian. Yes, “The Boy’s Word” looks extremely authentic. Almost like the documentary short films released in Kazan in 1987 and dedicated to the same topic – “Scary games of the young” and “What’s in your yard?” (Kryzhovnikov, by the way, inserted fragments of the latter into the second episode for clarity). But still, the new series is not a social essay or an analytical report on the phenomenon. There is no reflection here on the costs of Soviet urbanization. Rather, it is an attempt to generalize an experience that is remote for the modern viewer, a poem about the untruth into which cruelty inevitably plunges a person, a movie in which the whirlwinds of evil equally dashingly spin the guilty and the innocent, a very timely movie.
If there is a claim to documentary here, then it is, perhaps, exhausted by the painstakingly recreated life: the interiors of late Soviet apartments and the chunky, ugly clothes worn by the heroes. From this texture – recognizable, tangible and at the same time stunningly distant – and the dozens of reliable stories that the book gave, Kryzhovnikov weaves an epic tapestry. This is something like “Gangs of New York” based on late perestroika material, the construction of modern Russian society, captured without much snot. Based on the first episodes, it is difficult to say where this story of turning “chushpans” into boys will take the viewer.
The author’s intensity and expression are captivating; everything that makes Kryzhovnikov’s cinema worth loving is present: an uninhibited camera, well-conceived crowd scenes, passionate acting (the casting here is golden). But something tells us that we still have to think hard about how to explain the sympathies that the viewer involuntarily feels for the main characters. And what to do with them? Fortunately, despite the concerns, “The Boy’s Word” cannot be accused of romanticizing violence. The wheel of cruelty methodically rolls over all the characters, gaining such momentum by the fourth episode that you just have to hold on. If after watching “The Brigade” someone wanted to follow in the footsteps of Sasha Bely or at least put the appropriate melody on their mobile phone, then those who saw the pioneer bloody mess because of a handful of change or the wrong hat are unlikely to think about the dignity that supposedly brings life according to the concepts . Concepts—and Kryzhovnikov formulates this clearly—serve exclusively the interests of the powerful. The truth – if it comes with a weapon – is always in force, and rarely, almost never, vice versa.
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