When James Dean was killed in a high-speed car accident on Sept. 30, 1955 at the age of 24, the actor became a symbol for a forgotten generation of youth living through the marked cultural shift of post-war America. Rarely can one individual embody and express in his art the fears and hopes of an entire generation, and yet today on the other side of the world, we are seeing the tragic story of Russia’s James Dean.
This past Friday, Sept. 20, a massive avalanche in a remote area of the Caucasus mountains in southern Russia buried a 15-mile long, sparsely populated gorge up to 200 feet deep in ice, boulders and mud. Among the nearly 100 people still missing, presumed dead, is Russian actor-director Sergei Bodrov, Jr.
Bodrov and his crew were high in the mountains filming his second directorial effort, Connected (Svyaznoy). Two cameramen from the group rescued Sunday reported that 20 minutes prior to the avalanche the remainder of the group was headed directly into what was to be the path of destruction. In all likelihood, Bodrov is dead at the age of 30.
Bodrov is an icon?the icon?for the first generation of Russian youth to come of age since the fall of the Soviet Union. His 1997 starring role in director Alexei Balabanov’s Brother (Brat) made him a superstar across Russia. Bodrov plays the young Danila Bagrov, a Chechen war veteran sent by his mother to Petersburg to live with his brother to keep him out of trouble. Unbeknownst to Danila, his brother is actually a mafia hit man, and the film thus begins to spiral into a Dantean maelstorm of murder, sex and drugs. Stylistically, Brother evokes comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Robert Rodriguez’s shoe-string budget hit El Mariachi. Since the fall of communism, the meteoric rise of organized crime, poverty, alcoholism and drug addiction have hit Russia’s youth hard, and Bodrov’s Brother, being screened here on campus Oct. 17 by the International Film Series, addresses this reality with an intensely personal style and insanely Russian notion of cool. After the success of Brother, the Russian press named him “face of a generation,” a label he himself detested.
In the west, however, Bodrov is best known for roles in East-West (Vostok-zapad) and the Oscar-nominated Prisoner of the Caucuses (Kavkazskii plennik). While the dual French-Russian produced East-West personalizes the terror of Stalin’s reign through some of history’s slickest cinematography ever, in all Bodrov’s other films the Chechen war serves as a powerful subtext, if not as the outright subject of the film, as it does in War (Voina) and in 1995’s Prisoner of the Caucusus. In Russia, military service is compulsory for young men lacking the money to bribe their way out of it.
This past year, Bodrov again tackled that sensitive subject, teaming up with Balabanov to produce War, the first film to offer a powerful and nuanced look at the social repercussions of Russia’s ongoing war in Chechnya. The film plays with Shakepeare’s Hamlet in cleverly developed motifs, and Balabanov’s innovative inclusion of handheld digital video footage invites delightful post-modern analyses of the film.
American critics have dubbed Balabanov “the Russian David Lynch.” This comparison is decidedly flattering to Lynch, as Balabanov’s films play opposite Hollywood blockbusters and are watched and appreciated by more than just maladjusted indie-film shut-ins. Sadly, the films of Bodrov and Balabanov are among painfully few made in Russia that have seen play in the West, despite a cinematic tradition including such revolutionary figures as Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Atamanov, and countless outstanding popular films, like The Irony of Fate (Ironiya sudby) and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit).
In their heyday, these Soviet classics match the introspective optimism of It’s a Wonderful Life, while Bodrov’s films display the abandon and uncertainty seen in Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause. Bodrov’s uncanny presence and ability to embody in his roles the fate of a generation gave Russia its first international star in the post-Soviet world. With Bodrov’s death, the film world lost an up-and-coming star, but Russia lost an icon.
