gangster American movies, film noir, thriller and even western, through his reification as a new style, absolutely of his own but mixed with key elements from Russian reality and tradition. With auteur sensibility, but with an eye for the audience, Balabanov created some of the more impressive and intelligent examples of a perfect balance between film d’auteur and popular genre movies, unparalleled before in Russian cinema.Anton Dolin. “Dead Man’s Bluff” as Hypertext
Aleksei Balabanov’s seventh film is generally assumed to be a trifle, a pure genre exercise, and at the same time a tribute to the postmodern fashion of double-layered gangster movies (the director repeatedly named “Pulp Fiction” among his favourite films). Yet another approach is possible. Directing a script he didn’t write for himself and casting superstars of Russian cinema, including its informal tsar Nikita Mikhalkov, in all the roles, Balabanov analysed the structure of Russian cinema, its system of false genres, influences, aesthetical preferences and ethical references. Having readily assumed the role of “the Russian Tarantino” imposed on him, Balabanov used the opportunity to make an explicit, unreserved statement on the cultural context in which he was forced to exist. Behind the seeming absurdity of “Dead Man’s Bluff” lies a ruthless critique of not Russian life proper but the “second reality” produced by it.
Alena Solntseva. Russian World Apocalypse
Starting with the film “Brother”, Aleksei Balabanov engaged himself in exploration of the so called “Russian World’s” foundations, the “Russian idea” which, after the USSR had dissolved, became the national ideology of the “siloviki” (the word was rarely used in the mid-1990s, but it is not a coincidence that the word “sila” (force, power) is found so often in Balabanov’s scripts). Inside the limited framework of the action or thriller genre, local particularities flourish. Bodrov’s character—the invincible Russian Rambo, or the national Bond—is an embodiment of that new Russian type which manifested itself in full force in the “Novorossiya” project. He is an outright monster despite the evident charm of this “thick-lipped boy.” His monstrosity—the lack of empathy, of common sense or sense of reality—is demonstrated quite convincingly, however, few perceived it that way at the time of release. It is interesting that while Balabanov probes the slough of the people’s life, he discovers no solid ground whatsoever, which leads to the macabre of “Cargo 200”, “The Stoker”, and “Me Too”. Illusive ideals do not hold a structure, the world falls to pieces because violence, its only cementing force, cannot bear real weight.
Yuri Saprykin. From Chicago to Donetsk, or The Warrior’s Way
The most popular film by Aleksei Balabanov which at the moment of release was perceived as a genre play bordering provocation, turned out to be the most providential as well. “Brother 2” was the first to foresee and embody the ideology, ethics and aesthetics of the “Russian World”, the ideological system that, as of 2015, defines Russian politics, is accepted by the majority of population and brings great shocks.
Darya Ezerova. “Me Too”: Between Fantastic & Magical Realism
In an interview following the release of his last feature film “Me Too” Aleksei Balabanov referred to it as a work of “fantastic realism”. This succinct formulation alludes to the tradition of magical realism and invites a close analysis of the film in the light of the artistic movement that perhaps had the most complex relationship with 20th-century literary modernism.
With the unexplained fantastic elements seamlessly interwoven with Balabanov’s signature hyper-realism, bizarre naming, themes of death and transcendence, and the incantation-like, disorienting soundtrack, “Me Too” demonstrates the director’s take on magical realism and in this way becomes distinctly different from the rest of Balabanov’s oeuvre.
This paper strives to uncover a less-studied modernist strand in Balabanov’s work—that of magical realism—through a close analysis of the ways in which its various tropes and elements are employed and re-imagined in his last film.
Aleksandr Pogrebnyak. Judgement of History: Balabanov’s Verdict
The main line of Balabanov’s films is philosophising contemporary Russian history whose logic is most clearly reflected in the dialectic trinary of “Dead Man’s Bluff”, “Cargo 200”, and “Me Too”. The first of those represents the 1990s, and its jocular tone enhances the critical diagnosis to the contemporary Russian statehood—the point is not even that an office with a view to the Kremlin is taken by a thug but that he is a subject who stakes on “safety measures” that guarantee him survival in any situation. “Dead man’s bluff” with a bulletproof folder is a sign of a radical dystopia—in the 1990s succeeded only he who was choosing foul play by default and preferred self-preservation instinct to existential authenticity—which is why the main value now would be “stability”, fair play for everyone else. “Cargo 200”, set in the 1980s, is not only a backstory but also an antithesis of “Dead Man’s Bluff”—even though motives of despair, pathology and absolute evil prevail here, utopian theme is also present; characters might kill and rape each other but nonetheless they all have human dreams—which is why a perspective, a horizon of future opens in the film’s end. Finally, “Me Too” may be seen as a final result: the people of Leninsk of the day before yesterday no more have a place in Moscow or Saint Petersburg; their “happiness” transformed into an “empty signifier”, and the “law” turned out to be the heaven’s irrational will; the power does not prevent them from going to the zone from which no one has ever returned.
Aleksei Medvedev. Balabanov: Genre as Metaphor
Genre and metaphor, it would seem, are non-congruent phenomena. However, in Balabanov’s work genre elements turn out to be not merely instruments to construct a story but precisely metaphorical references to mentalities and mindsets. It is not only, and not so much, a genre irony or an ironic commentary to Russian cinema of the 1990s, that is, not a second reality, but an exposure of rules in accordance with which our reality functioned, and still does. For instance, the moon in “Cargo 200” only at a first glance is a marker of horror, of zombies and vampires to come; it is, in fact, a concise and clear indicator that real ghouls are already here. It is this paradoxial use of genre that the paper is dedicated to.
John MacKay. “I Don’t Like Directors Much”: Balabanov’s Self-Reflexive Cinema
Balabanov’s films are often taken to be tough, realist portraits of Russia, past and present. Yet there is a distinctly modernist interest in filmmaking itself as a theme in his films, hidden allegorically within their plots. This paper is trying to read a few of Balabanov’s
