Assa

A cult perestroika film uniquely combining a testimony of its time period with underground music, a love story with crime, all intertwined with a multitude of postmodern games not only in film form (the intertitles explaining slang expressions, the psychedelic experimental dream sequences of the main character, the contrast between the main storyline and the story of the murdered Tsar Paul I taken from a real book by N. Ejdelman, being read by one of the characters). A true monument of its time, not only because its plot takes place in 1980 and particularly captures the paradoxical era, but in addition to Brezhnevism, it also bears witness to the era of Gorbachev – we must realize that it was written in 1987 and the most positive character is a good-for-nothing musician of an underground band. The ending belongs to the song "Перемен!" (We are waiting for changes). Assa is also a true memento of a destroyed world - perhaps only in the former so-called Eastern bloc there was a belief that the only thing standing in the way of true life, art, etc. is the evil repressive state, and that once we get rid of it, we will be able to live a sweet unrestricted life like in the West, finally devoting ourselves freely to our creativity and through it surely improving the world. The totalitarian state was washed away by a flood, but that free world of creative self-expression in a dehumanizing impersonal world somehow did not materialize. (07/28/2014)