THE VANISHED EMPIRE
Produced & Directed by Karen Shakhnazarov
Written by Evgeny Nikishov & Sergei Rokotov
Released by Kino International
Russian with English subtitles
Russia. 105 min. Not Rated
With Alexander Lyapin, Lidiya Milyuzina, Ivan Kupreyenko, Yegor Baranovsky, Yanina Kalganova & Armen Djigarkhanyan
 

A well-wrought period piece can conjure nostalgia for a place and time that was never ours. Set in the Soviet Union during 1970s, The Vanished Empire may not leave us yearning for commie credentials—much less empty grocery shelves—but it will certainly warm and color our limited conceptions of this murky era.

Unlike the Russian films usually trickling into American art-house cinemas (long, slow, sometimes painfully poetic—think Russian Ark or anything by Andrei Tarkovsky), this easy mood piece by prominent director Karen Shakhnazarov won’t require any coffee breaks. The simple story focuses on a litter of college kids eking out an existence in urban Moscow. Sergey (Alexander Lyapin), the grandson of a famed archeologist, coasts through college with both eyes on the girls and none on the books. His wingmen, the sober Stepan (Yegor Baranovsky) and the plucky Kostya (Ivan Kupreyenko), weave in and out of the film with no greater purpose than to fill in the scenes and tease out the disparate facets of Sergey’s character—sometimes callow and disarmingly sweet, yet suddenly rash and callous.  

Sergey’s restless attention lands on Lyuda (Lidiya Milyuzina), a fresh-faced schoolmate whom he tries to seduce with charm and contraband from the West. Whether he’s showing off a pair of real denim jeans or risking arrest to buy a smuggled Rolling Stones album, the forbidden fruits of capitalism stand in for roses and bonbons.

To an outsider, such a deep thirst for Western art might make Soviet culture seem naturally inferior. How could you compare a city like New York or Paris, with their free flow of books, art and films, to Moscow, the center of Censorville? Decades on, we can now begin to appreciate, guiltlessly, a beautiful and curious side effect of Soviet censorship: the very limitations placed on what Russians could see, read, or hear created an unprecedented enthusiasm for art and compelled people to share, internalize, and argue over whatever little of it was available. It was akin to the first decades of American television, except an entire culture was broadcast on a single channel.

The Vanished Empire beautifully and honestly recreates the book-strewn Soviet interiors, from the teacups to the carpets on the wall, where identical tomes filled identical bookshelves and everyone read the classics. Shakhnazarov devotes most of the film to such rose-tinted reminiscences. He sends the characters to a mystical village in present-day Uzbekistan (home to an ancient vanished empire) and a Black Sea resort, adding a travelogue to his exercise in nostalgia. But the true vanished empire, the Soviet Union, is never directly addressed. In one brief, portentous scene on a rocky beach, Sergey asks Kostya “What’s going to happen to us in 30 years?” And as the film ends, the Soviet ’70s somehow seem both stagnant and yet, if only in the distance, electrifying. Yana Litovsky
July 10, 2009