Prorva Reviews

A motley crew of lost souls shudders under a totalitarian shadow in this Russian variation on CABARET, which loses something in translation. 1939: Germany and Russia have signed their infamous pact and while Hitler plots to carve up Europe, Russia faces its own reign of terror under the Secret Police (NKVD). The elite NKVD crowd is an unhappy one: Anna (cabaret star Ute Lemper) drinks and parties because she resents the fact that her husband, Sacha (Alexandre Fiklistov), puts duty above romance. He's more concerned with orchestrating a propaganda parade than he is with defending his wife's honor against the advances of cronies like Vassili (Alexei Kortnev). Weary of her ineffectual spouse, Anna hangs out with a lawyer (Vladimir Simonov), who is defending a four-time murderess named Gorbatchevskaia (Ekaterina Rijikova). Although the wily attorney plans to save his seductive client's neck by getting her pregnant, he has no legal recourse in the case of Mitia (Dimitri Dyhovichny), a talented, free-thinking writer who was denounced publicly by a friend. When she isn't swanning around town with the attorney or Mitia, Anna sings on top of pianos and lashes out at her mate; after spotting a macho porter, Gocha (Evgeni Sidikhin), at the train station, she hurls herself into an obsessive affair. Anna becomes possessive and her muscle-bound lover shoves her and injures her eye. As Stalin's red letter day arrives, everyone is trapped in some sort of legal or romantic tangle, and as the characters purge themselves emotionally, Stalin literally purges his of opposition. This pretentious political musical resembles something Dennis Potter might have dreamt up, but director/co-writer Ivan Dykhovichny and co-writer Nadezhda Kozhusannaya can't pull of the mix of razzle-dazzle and dead-serious subject matter. Their script relies heavily on epigrams and the pointless song-and-dance numbers, which are meant to comment on the death of autonomy only reveal the shabbiness of the writers' concept.