"Brother" -- a Russian gangster movie

[Louis Proyect]

Alexei Balabanov's "Brother," now showing at NYC's Film Forum, is the first
post-Soviet film that accurately reflects life after the fall of Communism.
This cynical, hard-boiled gangster film does not deal in nostalgia for some
glorious Stalinist past, however. Like many new post-Soviet intellectuals,
Balabanov is mesmerized by the callous and hedonistic society taking shape.
The brave new world of drugs, rock-and-roll, crime and nihilism might be
dragging the world down around them, but the characters in "Brother" plan
to have a good time in the process, like a party on the deck of the sinking
Titanic.

Danila (played by Sergei Bodrov, Russia's hottest new actor) has just
arrived in St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, to look up his older brother
Viktor (Victor Sohurukov), a free-lance hit-man. Danila has just finished
serving in the Russian army and is unemployed. Without any fanfare, Viktor
drafts his younger brother into the family business. Viktor asks him if he
was taught how to shoot a gun in the army. The laconic younger brother
replies that they took him to the firing range like everybody else, but he
spent most of his time at h.q.

The running joke of the entire film is that the baby-faced, sweet-natured
younger brother turns out to be the most proficient killing machine since
Rambo. Although he never brags about his prowess, clearly he has become an
expert on the battlefields of Chechnya or some other post-Soviet killing
ground. It is in fact a Chechen gangster who is Danila's first target.
Danila first rents a room downtown near the market where the Chechen gang
boss takes his morning constitutional and kickbacks from merchants. He then
stakes out the area in disguise, and once he settles on a plan, goes back
to his room where he constructs a bomb made of matchstick heads and
gunpowder to use against the Chechen.

When Danila is not busy killing bad guys, he behaves like any young
Russian. He listens to his favorite rock-and-roll music, played by the
Russian group Nautilus, on his beloved Sony Walkman. He picks up a street
drug peddler after getting paid for his first hit. The punked-out young
woman takes him first to a disco and then to a private party where
everybody is smoking pot, drinking vodka from the bottle and listening to
the latest rock-and-roll. All the young murderer wants to do is talk about
his favorite band, Nautilus.

The telephone wakes Danila early next morning, in the middle of a terrible
hangover. His brother has lined up another job for him. He is to accompany
two creepy hit-men on a raid against a rival gangster. When they burst in
to his apartment, only one of his underlings is there, whom they bind and
gag. Danila asks the other hit-men and the captive if they have any
aspirin. When they reply no, he wanders into a party in progress upstairs.
People are listening to rock-and-roll, smoking pot, playing pool and
conversing pleasantly. They give him some aspirin and invite him to stay
and enjoy himself but he can't stay because he has business downstairs that
must be taken care of.

After returning downstairs to rejoin his fellow killers, he answers a knock
at the door. It turns out to be a invitee to the party upstairs who has
wandered into the wrong place. They pull him into the apartment and tell
him to keep quiet and he won't be harmed. It turns out that the new captive
is a music video director whom Danila immediately befriends. He also
promises him that no harm will come to him as long as he is there. He then
starts to pump the terrified man all about the music business and raves to
him about Nautilus, his favorite group.

After several hours, when it becomes clear that their intended target is
not going to show up, Danila's fellow hit-men stab the bound and gagged
lieutenant to death. Just as they are about to do the same thing to the
director, Danila intervenes and kills them instead. He tells the frightened
director that he always keeps his promises.

Danila might be a professional killer, but true to gangster film formalism,
he is a professional killer with a heart. In an earlier scene, he steps
into a confrontation between a cowed streetcar conductor and two hooligans
who refuse to pay their fare. He sticks a gun in their face and makes them
pay their fare. Danila's attitude must strike a strong chord in Russian
audiences, who have made this the highest-grossing film of 1997. Perhaps
the only way to deal with the scum of Russian society is through vigilante
action, like the kind celebrated in Charles Bronson's "Death Wish" films.

Balabanov has clearly immersed himself in American B movies and has made a
movie to compete with them on their own terms. But "Brother" has more
intelligence than this. You sympathize with the main character, who has
lost his moral moorings, because the rest of society has also. There is no
other way to survive. Danila allows himself to get sucked into the jungle,
but tries at the same time to preserve his own integrity. More than any
other professional killer in cinema history, Danila will remind one of the
samurai Toshiro Mifune played in Yojimbo and Sanjuro. The out-of-work
swordsman hires himself out to gangsters and warlords who are making life
hell for the peasants, but brings peace by killing the rivals, one faction
after another.

Organized crime in the former Soviet Union is not only a inviting topic for
film-makers, it is also a genuine problem for those trying to introduce
capitalism there. Fred Weir writes in "Revolution from Above" that 70 to 80
percent of private industrial and financial institutions are forced to make
payments of 10 to 20 percent of their annual revenues to organized crime.
Two members of the Russian parliament were murdered by hit-men during
1994-95. Even more alarmingly for those of us living in New York City or
wherever real estate is at a premium, Weir states that some residents of
well-located Moscow apartments have been murdered in scams aimed at
obtaining ownership of newly privatized apartments.

Meanwhile Russia has just received a $20 billion IMF loan, which nobody
expects to bring the ailing economy to life. Gangsterism will not disappear
either, since it is endemic to the sort of capitalism that is taking root
there. In a society that worships material success but that does not give
outsiders a means to such success, criminality is just another way to
succeed. Meanwhile there is convincing evidence that drugs are as important
to the Mexican economy as oil is to Saudi Arabia. The downwardly spiraling
world economy practically insures that crime will continue to be big
business in Russia and the rest of the world.


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)