When I reviewed HBO’s hit series “Chernobyl” on Twitter a couple of months ago, I had casually mentioned that there is a Russian-made product on the same topic getting ready to hit the screens. The one with glorious KGB agents, evil CIA spies, and the heroic Motherland doing heroic Motherland things, without any of that Yankee stuff that Craig Mazin had put into his creation. You know, stuff like moral ambiguity, convincing characters and emotionally devastating realism. These Western inventions had surely only spoiled the HBO series and are definitely not in demand in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where patriotism and “pride in the graves of the grandfathers” are the mainstays of the cultural diet.
I give you “Chernobyl” (I mean, what else is it going to be named?), a series from the Amalgama Studio, not previously known for major hits. The first trailer* has just dropped, and, boy oh boy, this is going to be exactly the type of glorious motherland’s shock workers’ revolutionary heap of trash that was to be expected. Those of you who had big issues with Mazin’s decision to have the actors speak in British-accented English, rejoice. Here is your fix of actors speaking accent-free Russian. Or, rather, delivering carefully memorized lines while doing all they can not to stare directly at the camera, which is what people performing for The Audience of One are normally tempted to do.
* The YouTube video has already been taken down after less than a day. To get an idea why, see the last graphic of this post. But the Internet has eternal memory, comrades…
We begin with The Most Russian Scene Ever.
What can be more Russian than a man making shashlyki at his dacha? Only a man making shashlyki at his dacha while wearing a Soviet-style track suit and squatting. The very first scene of the trailer immediately tells you that this, THIS, COMRADES, is genuine Russian product. Making skewered meat while at your suburban summer house and looking like a stereotypical Level 10 Russiki is a Ministry of Russianness Quality Stamp itself. This ain’t no HBO, friends. This here man… his is so Russian, he breathes vodka, sweats Molotov cocktails and poops once a year. Next time you depict an American hero, dear Western filmmakers, please, make sure the opening scene has him grilling hamburgers in a Rocky IV t-shirt in the Canyonlands National Park.
So, this is our hero, we will presume. The emotionally tortured Legasov he isn’t, but surely he has some Deep, Uniquely Russian Internal Pain tearing him apart, doesn’t he? Ah, enter the Dutiful And Downtrodden Russian Wife.
Uh-oh, fellas, we all know this look, don’t we? Those of you with Russian mail-order brides will probably recognize it as The Three Weeks Later. It appears that the lady is here to perform the one duty that Russian cinema has bred her for: to nag the hero about working too much.
“Listen”, the wife says as she is still approaching the man with those plates of unidentifiable Soviet food. “Ten years! Ten years I have been waiting to become more important than your work.”
As she haltingly delivers her lines, the husband is fanning the flames of his mangal while we understand two things: 1) she waited 10 years to deliver the monologue at one time when no Russian man would ever tolerate being distracted, 2) the hero’s Internal Pain is the standard, prepackaged Duty to the Motherland vs. Duty to the Family dilemma. Spoiler alert: the Motherland wins. The Motherland always wins. The woman will understand.
“I love you”, he mumbles in one very convincing performance of the entire trailer, because the actor’s demeanor clearly conveys that he actually means “Can I just get back to my meat?” The woman runs off, saying “I love you too, but what does it change?” I wonder whether her Internal Pain will be Duty to Husband vs. Need to Nag. Spoiler alert: there are no winners here, kids.
Speaking of kids, the wife and the daughter are at a bus station now. The kid is displeased at the mom’s decision to go to “some Pripyat” instead of visiting grandma in Chernihiv. The accents, by the way, are by no means Ukrainian at all. The kid rolls her R’s and stresses her G’s in the most Russian way imaginable. Then again, the family might not actually live in Ukraine. Anyway, why are they there?
Ah, well, of course, Russian trailers don’t believe in keeping you guessing. The next scene is the husband talking to his colleague in another display of awkward acting. The furrowed brows, the ominous looks, the ham-fistedly created aura of serious machismo. Of course, the hero is a KGB agent, following his mark to the classified city of Pripyat. We are not taking bets on whether the mark’s nationality rhymes with “Shmamerican.”
“Are we planning an arrest?” asks his colleague?
“As the circumstances dictate”, answers the hero, passing a verbal kidney stone as the actor does the Manly Hero Saying a Manly Thing Face.
The disaster has struck, and we are at the Politburo meeting, the scene being visually recreated almost frame-by-frame from the HBO show. But this is where the similarities end. The Russian Gorbachev looks more true to life, but there aren’t any conflicts, any revelations, any emotional strain. A Soviet official monotonously, if again haltingly, relays the radiation level. Nope, nobody is saying it’s 3.6 roentgen (“Not great, not terrible!”), nobody is hiding the truth. It’s a very straight-laced report. Nobody was deceiving anyone in the Soviet Union. Just simple, honest government officials about to do their utmost.
The Lyudmila and Vasily plot line, which Mazin borrowed from Svetlana Alexievich’s book “Voices From Chernobyl” is here too. The Russian Lyudmila is considerably prettier and, oh my gosh, she might actually be a wooden cutout! “I think that if I leave, something might happen to Vasily”, she bleats to her friend. Who promptly answers: “What, what can ever happen to [your military husband who is currently fighting fire at a burning nuclear power plant]?”
Following an evacuation scene with the cleanest roads and the shiniest cars ever seen in the history of Russia…
… we have a child separation thing happening, with the daughter being torn away from the mother’s arms as an army captain says in that same monotonous drone: “Do you want her to get sick from you? Is this what you want?” We are left to assume the wife of the hero does not want that. A scene of thoroughly unconvincing anguish follows.
But who cares, for we are in the Citadel of Evil now…
… where it appears that some folks have just finished playing a game of musical American flags. Seriously, just look at this room. Which country is it in, do you think? If you said “America”, you win… nothing, because the dude apparently in charge is definitely not a native English speaker. Oh well, at least the Russian accents are consistently genuine in this film.
So, we have an American spy who receives a strange small box from his boss in a scene that looks a bit like a botched proposal. He is off to Chernobyl because “our relations with Russia will soon significantly change.” You are on your own in figuring out what conceivable reason the CIA would have to mess around in Chernobyl, but is it really that important? The CIA is evil. It does evil things against the glorious Motherland. It’s all you need to know, comrade.
I mean, just look at what this asshole does!
Here is our hero, walking through a train car full of happy Soviet youths doing what Soviet youths always did in the imaginations of nostalgic citizens: playing a guitar in the train. Instead of having it broken on their heads by a disgruntled babushka with a headache.
This is when the evil American strikes, pulling the emergency brake and sabotaging the Soviet railroad industry for decades to come. True fact: it still hasn’t recovered.
Back to Soviet Officials Officiating Sovietly:
“We shall immediately commence to break down the wall by the force of our human resources”, says the bald official (is this Shcherbina?) resolutely. “Sledgehammers, comrades, sledgehammers”, he clarifies. HBO’s writers, hang your head in shame.
More terrible acting follows as the hero and his wife chase down their daughter who escaped from the evacuators. It’s truly soul-rendering for all the wrong reasons.
But hey, let’s throw it back to another kind of biorobot.
Forget about hard decisions, brain storming sessions and all that other HBO nonsense. The resolute official is issuing commands and giving timelines.
“You have exactly 24 hours to calculate the maximum safe duration for people to be situated on the roof of the third reactor”, he declares, as biorobotically as possible.
“You have a month to clear the roof completely”, he says to another underling. “So that we could have a parade with an orchestra on it”, he adds, revealing Russia’s evergreen priorities.
Cut to the Lyudmila in the hospital scene, which is as sappy as it is terribly acted.
The terrible acting is probably the third main theme of this product, the first being How Underratedly Great the USSR Was and the second being Evil Americans, of course.
What we have here is a great representative of “Our Answer to Hollywood”, which is actually an entire genre of Russian filmmaking. Even though I don’t ever recall Hollywood asking Russian filmmakers about anything, The Answer is always: “We can do whatever you do, but with shitty acting and clumsy ideology.” But, hey, don’t take my word for it:
The top comments under the video say the following:
“National TV has shat itself again, what are you gonna do!”
“Great job guys, keep the bar high! Shit, as always!”
“Funny! They said the HBO series was phony. And, instead of the real story, they stuff Americans and the CIA into theirs. Just because of this, no need to watch it!”
“Respected director of this masterpiece. That load in your pants was probably put in there by the CIA as well. Please, check!”
“Hey, did they at least catch the American spy? What did he carry in the box, Barack Obama’s feces?”
Sorry for the abundance of scatological references. Russians express themselves colorfully. But here is a clean one:
“It’s hard to imagine a more convincing demonstration of the worthlessness of our TV product in comparison to the American one.”
