I’m turning to Russian cinema for Covid consolation
In Russia, as in much of the rest of the world, cultural life has been in a state of suspension since early spring. But from next Saturday, cinemas in Moscow are due to reopen, with the usual social-distancing protocols – and an additional, artistic restriction. The Russian culture minister, Olga Lyubimova, announced that only “light-hearted and simple” films will be screened, explaining that young people, who would be the first to return to cinemas, “want date movies”.
It may be that the choice of cheerful films reflects Ms Lyubimova’s own taste. When she was appointed to her post in January, the BBC reported that the former television journalist had expressed outspoken views on culture in a 2008 blog, listing ballet and classical music among her pet hates, and observing: “I don’t understand a bloody thing about arthouse cinema.”
Russian wits have been joking on social media that there is no better way to enforce social distancing at the flicks than an unrelieved diet of home-grown comedy. But a glance at the list of highest-grossing Russian films swiftly dispels any misapprehensions about the Russian soul thriving on gloom.
Along with science fiction, sports films and a stiff dose of folklorebased fantasy, the list of commercially successful movies includes such comic gems as The Best Movie (2008), in which the hero dies from a drug overdose at his own wedding and has to persuade God to let him into heaven; Our Russia: The Balls of Fate (2011), a caper involving the golden balls of Genghis Khan; and the 2019 Serf, featuring an exasperated oligarch who tries to reform his wayward son by tricking him into believing that he is a serf in Imperial Russia.
None of this, to be sure, sounds any more unpalatable than the reopening line-up trailed by our local Picturehouse. The offer includes a “compassion-filled unpicking of sexual politics”, an “epic and emotionally charged drama”, and “the latest in the terminally ill teen-romance subgenre” – options to which the golden balls of Genghis Khan seem an unexpectedly appealing alternative.
Despite my instinctive resistance to the terminally ill teen-romance subgenre, I have never quite managed to embrace the idea that a feelgood film is the certain antidote to gloom, spleen, ennui, accidie or any of the multifarious forms of melancholy. Our household is divided on this subject. My partner, whose father’s favourite film was The Sound of Music, has inherited the paternal filmic sweet tooth. In his case, it manifests itself in an insatiable appetite for romcoms. His lockdown was vastly cheered by the alluringly incompetent courtship rituals of Normal People’s Marianne and Connell. Mine was – how can I put this? – not.
I admit to doing the ironing to the gentle (and, at 80 episodes, almost interminable) comic jeopardy of Schitt’s Creek, but on the whole I am a firm believer in the homoeopathic approach to low spirits. “You think you’re feeling bad”, the theory goes: “Well, get a load of this!”
As it happens, the Russian classics, from Tolstoy to Svetlana Alexievich, with their unsparing psychological realism and inexhaustible relish for the hammer-blows of fate, have been my go-to Covid consolation. But I see that Serf is available on Youtube – so why not? At least it’s not a compassion-filled unpicking of sexual politics.