My Perestroika: Gorbachev Youth Grow Up
Eight-millimeter home movies and statist hymns from the Soviet past haunt Robin Hessman's My Perestroika, a documentary of a contemporary Russia pocked with international logos, in which five Muscovites recall their lives and, in the process, 40 years of national history. A married couple, teachers Borya and Lyuba Meyerson, testify for the camera alongside Borya's grade-school classmates, now middle-aged: Andrei, a well-off clothier; Olga, a single mother working for a billiard-table rental company; and Ruslan, a retired rock star not reconciled to the new world. Each tells a parallel story of mandatory youth-group membership during the Brezhnev '70s, the disorder of perestroika, the optimistic euphoria of 1991's demonstrations, and the subsequent onset of adult pragmatism and disillusion — the latter clearly evident after the election of Putin's appointed successor, Medvedev.
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Laemmle's Sunset 5
8000 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046
Category: Movie Theaters
Region: Out of Town
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The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history, even as Hessman occasionally overreaches to create anticapitalist anxiety, as when loading a scene of Andrei dictating company dress code with ominous significance. Adaptable Andrei thrives, as he probably would in any circumstance, while reactionary Ruslan shelters good-old-days memories from the reality of his still-gigging "sellout" ex-bandmates. The oddest evidence of Soviet-era cultural totality, however, is vintage footage of the band barking doctrinaire anti-authoritarianism, party-line punk. (Sunset 5)
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