Fabulously Foreign: My Perestroika

My Perestroika Dir. Robin Hessman; 2009; Run Time: 87 minutes

This year’s Documentary Edge Festival boasted, as the name would would suggest, quite an array of foreign and Kiwi based films. Liking the look of a few but being constrained by time issues (hell, I’m sure I’m not alone on that one) I ambled over one fine Saturday to see one before the Festival ended: My Perestroika, at the quaintly-lovable Academy Cinemas (for those who don’t know, it is under the Auckland City Library).

Armed with a couple of Russian friends and a male dragged along, I expected the film-documentary to be merely a prelude to a nice dinner somewhere. Yet My Perestroika manages to capture your attention quite quickly. It starts with a few black-and-white video clips of the old USSR regime and propaganda, but before long you are launched into five quite engaging stories.

The stories belong to quite diverse characters, all from the same primary-school class: Andrei, the successful business-owner; Olga, the pretty one; Lyuba and her husband Borya, alternative, philosophical teachers; and Ruslan, a rock-musician that busks on the street. What makes their accounts of the Soviet tirade so interesting are their candid attitudes: open and accommodating, they show you the smallest facets of their life, acknowledge their blindness to the regime, and graciously laugh it away as they compare it to the open corruption of much of the world today.

My Perestroika is not a clean film. You can see bits of laundry and ash hanging around the camera. The same can be said for the content. Although it is impossible for almost any kind of media to be without a bias, it was about as close as it comes to not having one. Andrei’s high-end shirt business is shot in much the same light as Olga’s servicing of the pool tables in some seedy part of the city. There seems to be little commentary on anything, most noticeably of what is good and bad for children, which is something that you would expect to see in a Soviet history film. Lyuba and Borya’s son, Mark, experiences everything that goes on in the house, passively smoking as he watches South Park. There are videos, black and white and crackly, of USSR kids’ campaigns to make posters and send letters and sing, all in aid of the communist dream, but no obvious judgment as to its happening. All is left for the consumption of the naked eye, and the camera is both indifferent and unflattering.

What I found best about the documentary, however, amid the constant smokiness of their apartment-bound lives (the documentary itself is like an ad for Marlboro; a ciggie is never far from any hand), was its open-endedness. Not to spoil it for the prospective viewer, I will leave you with the bitter last moments: shots back and forth, exactly matching, from the Soviet time to now,respectively. It leaves you thinking, despite the lack of a clear persuasive angle, that not really that much has changed; quite a scary thought.