Before getting to any of my musings, as a reminder, I want to first point out that this production is funded, at least partly, by Ford Foundation, so that you know what to expect as to the political innuendos it has to make, the ideological and propaganda line it has to toe, i.e., America good, Putin bad; Western-style democracy good, everything else bad.
Despite its political opinion, which I cannot disagree with more, the film still managed to make what it has to say on the human conditions of the, so to speak, Orphans of the Soviet System, shine through.
The film focused on 5 classmates of the 70s, when they were in grade school, and told Russia's history, or rather its major political events, from then on, through the classmates' personal recollections and opinings, weaving their present lives into the narrative, juxtaposing the past and the present.
The classmates, one self-styled ex-punk rock star (a rather minor one at that by all indication) who never got very far and lives day to day, one petty company employee that does billiard table maintenance, a couple of (in its marriage status sense) grade school history teachers (still teach in the same school they attended in the 70s), and one moderately successful businessman who makes his money as the local agent of a French shirts and ties company, forms a pretty diverse and representative segment of the bourgeoisie in today's Russia.
What follows is solid case studies, the conclusions of which, surprisingly but on second thought only logically, mimic what I often hear from the Orphans of our own Communist past.
The ones who got left behind in a society that no longer takes care of every one of its members no matter his or her capacity or who his or her parents are, understandably, long for the past.
Even the ones who style themselves "intellectuals", supposedly abhorring being propagandized and always professing an unending love and an undying quest for a "free" society and the "freedom" of thought, retain the values and the teachings of the past more than anyone else, and live more in the past rather than the present as if the cataclysm never happened, only that they never admit this reality of how they live their lives to themselves.
The only ones who love the present more are the ones who never really lived in the past. They are men of pragmatism not principles. They adapt. They change. They go where the money is. They will ever be successful no matter the society. But they contribute nothing and take away everything.
Of course, the irony is, as always, on the supposedly more "sophisticated", on the people who thought they had everything figured out.
They style themselves anti-establishment. But they chose the safest career. They want "freedom", and thus new horizon. But they are still in the same grade school 30 years later. They cheered for a "revolution". But they live in the past. They want "democracy". But they would be much better off, at least versus the classmates they are compared to in the film, had the Soviet Union lived on.
(First draft; Subject to further revisions.)
