Me Too

 Me Too (Alexsey Balabanov 2012) is a "shaggy dog story."  In my interpretation, a "shaggy dog story" is a quasi-improvised narrative, more or less picaresque, that proceeds with elaborate detail toward an ending that really isn't an ending at all.  In Balabanov's Russian film, the a group of rogues sets out to find happiness with, mostly, disastrous consequences.  The film's title derives from a repeated refrain in the dialogue:  someone says "I just want to find happiness," to which another replies "Me too."  The theme of the movie suggests an earlier silent film, quite famous in Russia, directed by the Soviet filmmaker Medvedkin, simply called Happiness, chronicling a peasant's slapstick attempts to find happiness, apparently against the backdrop of the man-made Ukrainian famine.  (I have reviewed that film elsewhere in these pages.)  In fact, Balabanov's real influence is Tarkovsky's Stalker involving a journey into an uncanny zone where wishes come true.  Stalker, of course, is one of the great masterpieces of Soviet cinema, ponderous, grave, and more or less humorless.  Balabanov's film is a slap in the face to Tarkovsky's masterpiece, a restaging of the primal quest in Stalker is farcical terms.

The movie begins with some flamboyant violence.  A gangster murders four people in a desolate, industrial wasteland near St. Petersburg.  We then see a musician, a bit like a wandering troubadour, wandering along the embankments of the Neva.  We see him enter a church, buy a 20 rouble candle, which he lights in front of an icon, repeatedly crossing himself, and reciting the Serenity Prayer well-known to us as the mantra of Alcoholic's Anonymous.  The troubadour goes to a disreputable steam bath qua tavern and cafe where he meets the gangster.  The gangster has just gone to church for confession and communion to cleanse his soul after the murders he has committed. (Throughout the film, he regales the others with hair-raising stories of murders and torture, acts of which he is proud.)  The gangster has learned that there is some kind of uncanny zone outside the city where a bell-tower translates people straight into heaven and eternal bliss -- he's learned this through a priest, of course, who is staying away from the place:  the bell-tower either sends you to heaven or you die. The gangster and the musician drive to a sanitarium where another man is being "dried-out" -- it looks like he's being subjected to some kind of shock treatments.  The gangster and musician beat up a couple of attendants and spirit-away their friend who immediately demands that they stop for a bottle of vodka.  The three men, then, go to squalid apartment building where they pick up the gangster's father and some warm clothes -- it's apparently always January around the bell tower although it's a hot day in the summer in St. Petersburg where the story takes place.  The men ride down to ground-level in what must be the smallest and most frightening elevator in film history.  Then, they set forth on their mission to visit the belltower.  Along the way, they pick up a prostitute, Lyuba (the name means "love") who is hitchhiking to escape her murderous pimp -- she's rather homely and has a philosophy degree.  By this time, everyone is pretty drunk.  They've slugged down the vodka bottle and the musician who is a member of AA has pretty decisively relapsed.  Out in the country, they encounter a checkpoint where soldiers are guarding the Zone.  The soldiers are nonchalant and let them through the perimeter where it immediately turns into a dark and grey January with heavy snow blanketing a ruined village and miles of hideous industrial wreckage.  As a joke, the misogynistic drunk from the asylum, says that women don't get to enter the bell-tower unless they are stark naked.  The prostitute strips naked and runs for miles, it seems, through the snow drifts, pausing once to cover herself with straw in a barn and wandering around in the naves of huge half-collapsed churches.  The four reprobates continue their drive and encounter a young man who we have previously seen on a TV in a tavern.  The young man was commenting as a 'talking head" on the discovery of a planet covered in water that seems to have intelligent life -- this is a reference to Tarkovsky's Solaris and establishes that film-maker's influence over the current proceedings.  The young man seems to know the future and correctly predicts which of the company will achieve bliss at the bell tower.  He's disgusted by the rogues in the car and decides to walk to the tower, disdaining their ride.  The four men reach a ruined place near the tower.  By this time, it's night and very cold but there are fires burning among scattered corpses who have died seeking the tower.  (The place is contaminated, like Chernobyl, with high-radiation, but, as the drunk says:  "Alcohol is a remedy against radiation.")  The whore shows up and the men impressed by her fortitude strip one of the corpses and give her some clothes.  Fortunately, there's a nearby liquor store and so the drunk breaks in and appropriates a couple more bottles.  The gangster asks the musician to play.  He strums his guitar and sings in a voice literally painful to the ears some kind of moronic punk-rock tune.  The musician obviously has no talent at all.  SPOILERS now follow:  if you intend to watch this movie, you may wish to stop reading here; the film is currently showing on MUBI streaming.

The gangster's father, who has not uttered a word throughout the movie, dies in the SUV.  The gangster fills duty-bound to bury the old man in the frozen soil.  The others set forth for the bell tower, a tall precariously leaning structure on the other side of windswept, frozen lake.  The prostitute, the drunk, and the musician stagger across the ice toward the bell tower.  Frozen corpses are strewn here and there on the ice.  At the bell tower, the prostitute and the musician enter.  The top of the tower jets a little steam into the air and they have apparently ascended to heaven.  The tower isn't interested in the drunk and he is left in cold and snow.  (Meanwhile, the gangster has succeeded in burying his father and, then, stretches out next to the grave where he dies.)  The drunk finds another man sitting in front of the tower.  This is Balabanov, the film's director himself.  He says that the tower has refused to elevate him to heaven even though he's a "famous film maker in the European Union of Directors."  Balabanov, playing himself, says that he once went to the famous, mystic lakes of Chelybansk where he bathed in healing mud.  He, then, drops dead.  The drunk enters the church one more time hoping for the rapture.  But nothing happens and so he goes outside to sit next to the moviemaker's body until he also falls face first into the snow.  

On reflection a pattern is apparent.  The whore had faith in Biblical proportions.  Seeking the tower, she runs for several miles naked and barefoot over the snow -- all on the basis of a maliciously cruel joke.  We see the musician lighting a candle in a church at the film's outset, genuflecting while he recites the Serenity Prayer.  God preserves and protects those with faith, not necessarily those who are deserving.  After all, the recovering alcoholic has spent the whole movie drinking and has zero talent as a musician.  The unrepentant gangster dies before ever seeing the tower.  His father, the young man says, "would be admitted but he won't make it out there."  Balabanov, who has produced this parable, isn't accepted either.  Nor is the drunk.  Seemingly, the film evidences the characteristic Christian message that salvation is by faith.  

Chelybansk Lakes is a misnomer for Chelyabinsk Lakes,  Chelyabinsk is the seventh largest city in Russia located near the Ural Mountains.  The lakes are in the foothills.  The large lake is said to by "crystal clear" -- there is a smaller nearby lake (lake Uvildy) that allegedly has curative properties.  (Balabanov describes it as a lake entirely comprised of black mud.)

Balabanov was 51 when the film was made said it was his "last movie."  And, sure enough, he died as a result of a seizure (or some say heart attack) shortly after the film was released in 2012.  Balabanov is an important first generation post-Soviet Russian film maker -- he is most notorious for his hyper-violent, sadistic, and misogynistic Cargo 200, about heroin smuggling in the caskets of Russian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, although the plot of the film is just a reprise of Faulkner's similarly violent and misogynistic Sanctuary.  I've seen one of his earlier pictures Of Freaks and Men, a movie about a Tsarist era photographer who traffics in sado-masochistic pornography.  The film was bleak, bitter, and very hard to understand.  Balabanov is said to have established the genre of the Russian gangster film with pictures like Brother and Brother 2.  He used many racist elements in his films and seems to have been nastily anti-Semitic.  Me Too is fairly funny, very well-acted, and so true to its Absurdist ambitions as to be pointless.