Page 118 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

virginal daughter's secret passions. Johann kills Dr Stasov who comes to rescue his kidnapped sons
photographed in the nude in Johann's underground studio. After the death of their pater familiar
the two respectable upper-class families are left to the mercy of the nightmarish duo. The 'freak
show' expands to include Putilov's 'cinematographic' shorts and live cabaret performances, where
the teenaged twins sing, while their mother and Liza are spanked by either Johann's senile nanny or
Daria. When the nanny dies, Johann falls into a psychotic fit; the twins kill Victor Ivanovich and flee
East, while Liza chooses the West. At the end Tolya dies of alcohol somewhere in the East, Liza gets
her spanking from a professional leather boy in the West, where, thanks to his smut flicks, Putilov
ascends to international fame, while the psychopath Johann literally drifts into oblivion down the
Neva River.
Shot in dull sepia, emphasising its temporality and material decay, the film is a sublime trip
through the 'lower depths' of society and the repressed bourgeois psyche, 'revealing Petersburg's
most grandiose buildings as hiding murky subterranean secrets'.39 The city has a deserted, graveyard
look to it, hinting of perversity and psychological abuse. Yet there are no victims and victimisers;
everyone seems to be confined to the uncanny sex-related torment of his or her own choice. Satsov's
nightmarish run to Johann's den is a 'near imitation of Gothic flight, where branching corridors and
circular passages transform forward movement into endless repetition'40 while Liza's 'accidental walk
into a bordello district of a foreign [Western] town' could be coming straight from Freud's infamous
autobiographical description of the uncanny experience. To quote Berdyaev again, a 'contemporary
man is free to choose between the religion of Satan and the religion of God, but cannot help being
religious'.41
The avalanche of melodramatic coincidences and doublings (Johann and Viktor Ivanovich, the
twins, the maids, and so forth) of urban myths (mostly about 'innocence unprotected'), and exotic
perversities (a blind woman, Siamese twins and a virgin) is left deliberately ambivalent and, dependant
on the viewer's predisposition, could be read either as ironically alienating or voyeuristically engaging.
Balabanov 'exhaustively drags the high canon of Russian cultural values down to cinema level,
enlisting the music of Prokofiev and Musorgsky, and the scrupulous reconstruction of decadent
symbolism and necrophiliac melodramatism. The ominous contrast between divine music and
corrupt reality creates titillation mixed with a sense of terror and guilt at the uncanny recognition of
forbidden pleasures, 'familiar and old-established in the mind' yet 'alienated ... through the process of
repression', imposed by the long years of Tsarist-Orthodox and then Soviet censorship.
In psychoanalytic terms, the obsession with sex and death, with sex as death and cinema as
death, is an expression, to quote Dobrotvorsky, of the 're-orientation from the collective towards the
personal encounter with existential problems' by ignoring the collective instincts and releasing the
repressed individual-physiological ones."*2 This explains the numerous staging of primal voyeuristic
scenarios (the libidinal tensions between Liza and her father, resulting in his death; the twins watching
their mother spanked; numerous peeping scenes, etc.). The attempt at restoration of the psychic
boundaries between the collective and the individual, the public and the private, comes through every
bit as tortuously uncanny as their collapse and sex emerges from the postmodern ambiguity as a form
of mundane horror, 'vertiginous and plunging - not a soaring - sublime, which takes us deep within
rather than far beyond the human sphere'.43
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