Assa (1987)

  Content warning:  homophobic slurs, racial slurs  One of Movie Club's members is in a Russian film and literature class so this week, we helped her with her homework, and indirectly helped me with this blog because I have been trying to catch up on TV while I'm waiting for my new job to start.  I've watched season 4 of Downton Abbey, season 1 of Severance, season 8 of Game of Thrones, tried to watch Carnival Row and bailed, and now I'm on season 3 of Sons of Anarchy.  

Alika (Tatyana Drubich) is on vacation with her gangster sugar daddy, Krymov (Stanislav Govorukhin), when she meets a young musician named Bananan (Sergei "Afrika" Bugaev).  While Krymov is running around setting up all his little schemes, Alika and Bananan see the sights of Yalta in winter.  

The plot is really very simple, but it's so meandering that it feels like it should be more complicated.  But it's just boy meets girl, girl has mobster boyfriend, mobster boyfriend gets jealous of boy.  Everything else is a distraction.  It's probably a metaphor for the dissolution of the Soviet Union and massive social change that happened in the late 80s/early 90s.  Cold War Russia is not one of my areas of expertise.  At least, not the parts that actually happened in Russia.  It also has a weird subplot about the assassination of a Tsar, again I assume a more heavy-handed metaphor.

If you are into music, this features a band called Kino that was apparently very famous for bringing Russian underground rock into the mainstream.  I don't even watch Eurovision so again, not my area.  

The whole thing is streaming on YouTube in very good quality, either in one complete shot or in two parts.  It was entertaining enough, in that cold, bleakly humorous Russian way.