Yuri Grymov's Chuzhie ("Strangers") is a beautifully shot movie that brilliantly accomplishes its twin objectives: Russian anti-American propaganda and fantasy fulfillment. It maintains a perfect balance between art and message. Non-Russian audiences would find it a caricature, if not offensive hate-mongering, but most Russians, with their decade of accumulated grievances and hunger to regain past glory, will doubt neither the Russians' nobility nor the Americans' vulgarity and brutality, because this is what they *want* to believe.
Five American doctors drive alone (with neither guides nor translators) through the desert of an unnamed Arab land to vaccinate children in a remote village, ostensibly motivated by good will. A group of Russians (a surgeon and sappers clearing mines) is juxtaposed on a background of local Arabs. Strangely, in this dangerous, international environment, only one character speaks a second language: a sapper, who understands just enough English to know that he has been insulted. The Americans' selfish motivations quickly become clear. They speak about "the team" and "the children", but each is obsessed with himself and his inadequacies. Americans' well-known philanthropy is revealed to be crassly self-serving, just as the cynical audience always suspected (and hoped). They are completely, stupidly culturally insensitive, though any American doctor has completed graduate school and spent a great deal of time with foreigners, if he is not an immigrant himself (has Grymov seen Harold & Kumar?). Russian filmmakers love grotesques, but assembling such an implausibly flawed group of doctors would require not only careful selection but genetic engineering. Some highlights of the five Americans (SPOILERS):
*Tom (Mark Adam) is the team leader—narrow, brittle, humorless, and dogmatic, he wants to Americanize the primitive Arab world. Sterile, he is unable to provide the child his wife wants. When the Arab guard deliberately leaves his gun next to Tom while he goes and rapes Tom's wife, Tom isn't man enough to defend his honor. Instead, when Tom's wife is later drinking with the grandfatherly Russian surgeon, Tom attacks *him*.
* Jane (Scarlett McAlister), Tom's red-haired wife, longs for a child, so she seduces the grim Arab guard and rendezvous with him repeatedly to copulate in various poses, finally to be violently raped.
* Miss Stone (Kathleen Gati), a sexually frustrated old maid, vaccinates children like an automaton. As warm and compassionate as her surname suggests, she expresses her feeling for the children by singing them "Row, row, row your boat" ENDLESSLY, mercilessly accompanying herself on an accordion, which the Arab boys eventually urinate on.
* Mike (Neil Patrick Stewart) is the passive white gay partner: shrill, prone to hysterics, and desperately afraid that he is getting older and unattractive. He wants to adopt an Arab boy.
* Bill (Jeff Grays) is the muscular black gay partner, stereotypically warm and affable. He likes lollipops (nearly always has one in his mouth) and also likes children, maybe too much: his long, slow proffering of a lollipop to a timid Arab boy is obviously a symbolic seduction.
The pattern is clear—American men aren't real men, American women aren't real women. In Grymov's cosmology, the Americans are demons, and the Arabs animals. Only the Russians are humans with souls, as the Russian surgeon demonstrates when he plays Miss Stone's accordion. The Russian surgeon saves an American's life, and a Russian sapper saves an Arab child. Both lose their own lives, betrayed by the ungrateful Americans. Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Courage, Faith, Hope, Charity—the Americans lack every virtue. Russians' customary heavy use of symbolism becomes laughable, e.g. such unsubtle product anti-placement as a bottle of Jack Daniels as a murder weapon. Russians have less trouble suspending disbelief because they want to believe the central message, that Americans have no souls. This serves the fantasy and propaganda interests: raising Russian self-esteem, dehumanizing the enemy.
From the beginning to the mocking "Happy End," Grymov's Chuzhie is humiliation. One American woman is urinated on, the other raped, whereupon she gets up smiling (after our initial shock, we realize she finally got what she wanted). The humiliation continues into the real world: one wonders why Grymov made the movie, who financed it (Roskultura, the Russian Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography), why the actors participated, and how they could subject the audience to such pandering and abuse. Web-searching for Chuzhie finds discussion expressing neither disgust nor embarrassment, but curiosity about whether the movie really was forbidden in the US by Condoleezza Rice, an absurd publicity-generating rumor broadcast by a Russian news program on TV7. Apparently nobody attempted to publicize Chuzhie outside Russia, quite the opposite: even in the Middle East, its unpleasant portrayal of Arabs would curtail its audience. But Americans will appreciate it most: 80% of the dialog is in English; only a native speaker will feel the stiltedness of the script and acting. Russians will listen to the simultaneous translation, in most movies an annoyance but in Chuzhie a mercy.
Russians claim they are portrayed just as badly in American movies like Rocky, Rambo, Top Gun, and Armageddon, forgetting serious, positive portrayals like in Dr. Zhivago and Enemy at the Gates. Armageddon showed a Russian cosmonaut as not evil, but goofy. Russians do not mind being hated or feared, but they want respect; ridicule is unforgivable. This movie attempts to be payback for all these slights combined, ending up a farce, a fantasy that reveals less about Americans than Russians, whose ancient inferiority complex clearly remains. It is no surprise that Chuzhie's producers did not want it shown abroad. Unfortunately, real respect and self-esteem will come from real achievement, not fantasy, and certainly not from nasty little movies like Grymov's Chuzhie.
Chuzhie ran several weeks in major Moscow cinemas. Together with the end of the Bush administration, Chuzhie will likely mark the nadir of US-Russian relations, though what the 2008 financial crisis portends is now anyone's guess. One hopes that the rising Russian victim mentality, fostered by certain interests, bears only passing resemblance to that of Weimar Germany.
Five American doctors drive alone (with neither guides nor translators) through the desert of an unnamed Arab land to vaccinate children in a remote village, ostensibly motivated by good will. A group of Russians (a surgeon and sappers clearing mines) is juxtaposed on a background of local Arabs. Strangely, in this dangerous, international environment, only one character speaks a second language: a sapper, who understands just enough English to know that he has been insulted. The Americans' selfish motivations quickly become clear. They speak about "the team" and "the children", but each is obsessed with himself and his inadequacies. Americans' well-known philanthropy is revealed to be crassly self-serving, just as the cynical audience always suspected (and hoped). They are completely, stupidly culturally insensitive, though any American doctor has completed graduate school and spent a great deal of time with foreigners, if he is not an immigrant himself (has Grymov seen Harold & Kumar?). Russian filmmakers love grotesques, but assembling such an implausibly flawed group of doctors would require not only careful selection but genetic engineering. Some highlights of the five Americans (SPOILERS):
*Tom (Mark Adam) is the team leader—narrow, brittle, humorless, and dogmatic, he wants to Americanize the primitive Arab world. Sterile, he is unable to provide the child his wife wants. When the Arab guard deliberately leaves his gun next to Tom while he goes and rapes Tom's wife, Tom isn't man enough to defend his honor. Instead, when Tom's wife is later drinking with the grandfatherly Russian surgeon, Tom attacks *him*.
* Jane (Scarlett McAlister), Tom's red-haired wife, longs for a child, so she seduces the grim Arab guard and rendezvous with him repeatedly to copulate in various poses, finally to be violently raped.
* Miss Stone (Kathleen Gati), a sexually frustrated old maid, vaccinates children like an automaton. As warm and compassionate as her surname suggests, she expresses her feeling for the children by singing them "Row, row, row your boat" ENDLESSLY, mercilessly accompanying herself on an accordion, which the Arab boys eventually urinate on.
* Mike (Neil Patrick Stewart) is the passive white gay partner: shrill, prone to hysterics, and desperately afraid that he is getting older and unattractive. He wants to adopt an Arab boy.
* Bill (Jeff Grays) is the muscular black gay partner, stereotypically warm and affable. He likes lollipops (nearly always has one in his mouth) and also likes children, maybe too much: his long, slow proffering of a lollipop to a timid Arab boy is obviously a symbolic seduction.
The pattern is clear—American men aren't real men, American women aren't real women. In Grymov's cosmology, the Americans are demons, and the Arabs animals. Only the Russians are humans with souls, as the Russian surgeon demonstrates when he plays Miss Stone's accordion. The Russian surgeon saves an American's life, and a Russian sapper saves an Arab child. Both lose their own lives, betrayed by the ungrateful Americans. Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Courage, Faith, Hope, Charity—the Americans lack every virtue. Russians' customary heavy use of symbolism becomes laughable, e.g. such unsubtle product anti-placement as a bottle of Jack Daniels as a murder weapon. Russians have less trouble suspending disbelief because they want to believe the central message, that Americans have no souls. This serves the fantasy and propaganda interests: raising Russian self-esteem, dehumanizing the enemy.
From the beginning to the mocking "Happy End," Grymov's Chuzhie is humiliation. One American woman is urinated on, the other raped, whereupon she gets up smiling (after our initial shock, we realize she finally got what she wanted). The humiliation continues into the real world: one wonders why Grymov made the movie, who financed it (Roskultura, the Russian Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography), why the actors participated, and how they could subject the audience to such pandering and abuse. Web-searching for Chuzhie finds discussion expressing neither disgust nor embarrassment, but curiosity about whether the movie really was forbidden in the US by Condoleezza Rice, an absurd publicity-generating rumor broadcast by a Russian news program on TV7. Apparently nobody attempted to publicize Chuzhie outside Russia, quite the opposite: even in the Middle East, its unpleasant portrayal of Arabs would curtail its audience. But Americans will appreciate it most: 80% of the dialog is in English; only a native speaker will feel the stiltedness of the script and acting. Russians will listen to the simultaneous translation, in most movies an annoyance but in Chuzhie a mercy.
Russians claim they are portrayed just as badly in American movies like Rocky, Rambo, Top Gun, and Armageddon, forgetting serious, positive portrayals like in Dr. Zhivago and Enemy at the Gates. Armageddon showed a Russian cosmonaut as not evil, but goofy. Russians do not mind being hated or feared, but they want respect; ridicule is unforgivable. This movie attempts to be payback for all these slights combined, ending up a farce, a fantasy that reveals less about Americans than Russians, whose ancient inferiority complex clearly remains. It is no surprise that Chuzhie's producers did not want it shown abroad. Unfortunately, real respect and self-esteem will come from real achievement, not fantasy, and certainly not from nasty little movies like Grymov's Chuzhie.
Chuzhie ran several weeks in major Moscow cinemas. Together with the end of the Bush administration, Chuzhie will likely mark the nadir of US-Russian relations, though what the 2008 financial crisis portends is now anyone's guess. One hopes that the rising Russian victim mentality, fostered by certain interests, bears only passing resemblance to that of Weimar Germany.