Valery Todorovsky Archives

SIFF 2010: Valery Todorovsky rocks on in ‘Hipsters’

[Originally published in Queen Anne & Magnolia News, June 9, 2010]

When it comes to cinema, for some of us (not naming names here), the terms “Russian” and “lugubrious” tend to be interchangeable. So encountering a movie like Hipsters is either liberating or deeply unsettling to one’s core values. This rollicking musical comedy, or comedy with lotsa music, is a hoot.

It’s 1955, and Moscowâ€”or at least a portion of its teens verging on 20somethingsâ€”does not believe in tears. On the other hand, quite a few party-line Communist youths do, and some of them are marshaling to conduct a night raid: a group of self-styled “hipsters” their age have gathered in a remote outbuilding to play jazz and dance. When the celebrants twig to the raid and try to escape, scissors-wielding apparatchiks lay hold of them and set about shearing their hair, which is done up in decadent fashion perceived to be Western. One gorgeous blonde (Elena Glikman) breaks free and runs into the adjacent park, with fervent reformer Mels (Anton Shagin) in pursuit. Even though the dance has been broken up, rambunctious jazz music continues on the soundtrack and scores their chase through the trees, tracked by a rushing camera in CinemaScope ecstasy.

Actually, Mels isn’t necessarily all that fervent in his commitment to repression. It’s more a matter of his having been browbeaten into it by his party supervisor and sorta-girlfriend Katya (Evgeniya Khirivskaya), a dark-haired zealot who gives every indication of being a stunner if only someone were to melt her severity a little. He catches up with the fleeing blonde, who identifies herself as Polza, which a second later isotopically transmutes into “Polly.” Even nicknames are vehicles for decadent Western influence, and it’s not long before Mels has become (say it isn’t so, comrade!) “Mel.”

Hipsters is one of two films representing SIFF 2010 Emerging Master Valery Todorovsky. The other, the 1998 Land of the Deaf, was not available for preview.

SIFF 2010: PV Dispatch 5 – Get Low, Get Hip, Get a Room (in Rome)

Hipsters (Russia, dir: Valery Todorovsky) – In 1955 Moscow, where the Soviet citizenry fills the streets in a palette of industrial blue, black and gray, a group of culture rebels parade about in rainbow colors that in America would be crimes against fashion—a cacophony of plaids and checks, greens and yellows and purples and other garishly clashing colors—and commit something much more daring: crimes against conformity. They are the self-defined “hipsters,” dancing to swing and small combo dance bands in fashions that defies the uniformity of the Soviet ideal. “I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t want to live like everyone else,” smiles the youth commissar of conformity, who proclaims that “Every hipster is a potential criminal.” Mels (Anton Shagin, who comes off as a wide-eyed Neil Patrick Harris) is part of the conformist army until he switches allegiances for the best of possible reasons: a girl, Polly (Oksana Akinshina). Mels dons the Soviet answer to a zoot suit, hits the Broadway scene and is rechristened Mel (in the Yankee-ization that all hipsters undergo), the newest member of the swing cat underground.

A musical (where they do indeed break into song and dance, evoking the mechanization of the industrial revolution when it’s the plebian citizens doing the honors but exploding in the plumage of mating birds when the dances erupt in the club setttings), a coming-of-age tale and an adventure in youthful rebellion, Hipsters (from Emerging Master Valery Todorovksy) is a bright blast of underground culture and expressions of individuality in a society where rebels are regularly jailed for much less. The eye-gouging color, flamboyant fashion, pompadours and curls and appropriated style is not just a fashion statement, it’s a cry of individualism and freedom in a country where “kowtowing to western ideology is punishable by up to ten years” and “a saxophone is considered a concealed weapon.” (And what about owning banned music, which here is copied and passed around on pirate discs cut into the remnants of old X-rays sheets?) It’s also a warped mirror reflection of what these soviet youths imagine American culture is like from the snatched glimpses and slivers of artifacts gleaned from between the cracks of the Iron Curtain, a recreation at least ten years out of date and exaggerated to hyperbolic extremes. Which, in a very real way, ultimately makes this a uniquely Soviet rebel culture. The drama itself is much more conventional, with kids forced to choose between their rebel identities and donning the costume of conformity for advancement, marriage, parenthood and responsibility, all of it essentially hurdled in a song to embrace the happy ending. But the story of Hipsters is less in the narrative than the evocation of this underground culture, in both the texture of realistic detail and expressionist song and dance sequences. And if you think you recognize Polly (“Good Time Polly to those who know”), it’s not just the American affection; she starred as Lilya in Lukas Moodyson’s Lilya 4-Ever.