Adventures in Late-Soviet Film: Intergirl and Little Vera
I’m trying to learn Russian, and so I have put myself on a diet of movies and TV in Russian only. I doubt it’s helping my language learning much since, as they say, Я знаю немного русский. But I’m having fun anyway by exploring a really cool streaming service for Soviet and Russian movies.
This database has a fabulous collection of contemporary Russian films along with some really fascinating Soviet films from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Yes, they’ve got a full compliment of Tarkovsky, but there’s plenty for other palates as well — like mine. Here are two of my recent favorites.
Intergirl (Интердевочка) is a moving 1989 film set in perestroika-era St. Petersburg and stars the great Russian actress Elena Yakovleva (I will leave you to find her Playboy cover on your own as this is a family-friendly publication). The film’s about a young woman who’s a nurse by day but a prostitute by night, as she tries to save money to improve her life. She’s a caring professional in both her day job and her sex work, and at the start of the movie she has met a great Swedish guy who seems to really love her.
The movie concerns her struggles to get out of the Soviet Union — her deadbeat dad, whom she’s never met, has to approve her exit, and demands a hefty bribe in return — and the moral quandries that ensue as she leaves her mother all alone. Then, of course, life in Sweden for a former Russian prostitute is not great. There’s some Soviet propaganda thrown in, of course, about the dangers of leaving the motherland (spoiler alert: her mother, a literalization of that motherland, kills herself). But otherwise, it’s a moving, complex slice-of-life movie that reminds me of that wonderful Ashley Judd movie from 25 years ago, Ruby in Paradise.
Little Vera (Ма́ленькая Ве́ра), a huge hit from 1988, was apparently the first Soviet movie with explicit sex scenes. (They’re pretty tame for a contemporary viewer, promise.) Set in Mariupol (a city in southeast Ukraine, on the borderline of the current war with Russian-backed separatists and a site of ongoing tension due to Russia’s current aggression in the Azov Sea), the movie tells the story of an angsty young woman who’s frustrated with the limitations of her life. Her family’s annoying (there are some great scenes of family apartment life that will make you thankful for spacious American homes), and her boyfriend’s boring. Then she meets a new guy, who’s kind of wild and bucks social norms. They want to get married, and to convince her parents it’s okay she tells them she’s pregnant, though she’s not. Oh, Vera. Then there is a truly crazy scene in which Vera’s dad stabs her new boyfriend after locking him in the bathroom. The police intervene, there’s an attempted suicide, and then an attempted rape by the old boyfriend. It’s quite a film.
I found this movie to be less of a realist melodrama than Intergirl, largely because we are not allowed much insight into the thoughts and feelings of our eponymous heroine. There’s something really modernist about Vera’s lack of interiority. At times she reminds me of Kreisler, the crazy protagonist of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr — he is constantly doing things he doesn’t mean to and doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know why he does what he does, and neither do we.
That’s how I felt about Vera, and this technique creates a kind of insanity effect: both Vera and the new boyfriend are acting out, but it’s all kind of scary because there’s no psychological depth behind any of it. We can see the socioeconomic reasons — the young adults have no opportunities; Vera’s dad’s an alcoholic because he’s also dissatisfied. But the psychological impacts of these socioeconomic conditions? The film doesn’t go there. Instead it doesn’t allow the characters to understand why they’re behaving as they do.
My Ukrainian friends chuckle when I tell them I’ve just watched Little Vera, and it’s interesting to see the strange shape of the nostalgia that the titles these popular Soviet movies can still invoke in contemporary Ukraine. In any event, follow along for further adventures in old Soviet melodramas.
