From Russia With Drugs
The Age
Friday October 31, 2008
Conrad Walters speaks to a star of an underworld film in the Russian Resurrection Film Festival.
SOMETIMES life and art do more than imitate one another, they intersect.According to Evgeniya Hirivskaya, one of the actors in the Russian drama Vice, one such merging occurred shortly after that film's release.The movie, one of the big events of this year's Russian Resurrection film festival, tells the story of a DJ named Denis (Maxim Matveev) who finds himself needing extra cash. He joins two friends in a mysterious late-night job that turns out to involve destroying a crime baron's car and stealing a cache of illegal drugs.He tries to opt out but is quickly pulled into a whirlpool of crime. The aggrieved drug boss recruits Denis in exchange for letting him go unpunished and foists his emotionally fragile sister on the DJ.For Hirivskaya, who portrays the sister whose life has been damaged by the drug underworld when she was a child, the intersection of life and art doesn't relate to her so much as to the director, Valery Todorovsky.Following the release of Vice, a stranger approached the director in a restaurant to share a story about the film's impact."He came to (Todorovsky) and said: 'My nephew is a drug addict and I gave him the film. He saw it, and he said, Oh my God, I just saw it from (another) side and I understand how it's terrible and I want to stop it now."'Hirivskaya, on the phone from Moscow, is at pains to say that although drug problems in Russia are apparent to everyone, for her the film was purely an opportunity to portray an intriguing, complex character."She's really a miserable girl and the complete opposite of me," she says. "Thank God, I had a great childhood."Even so, she doesn't claim immunity from the impacts of drug abuse in Russia. The filming, done in a provincial town outside Moscow was, she says, an object lesson in desperation."We didn't see it so much but we knew it was around," she says, describing the seedier locals as "looking strange" and noting the filming was done during the town's hottest summer for half a century.In Russia, the reception for the film was enthusiastic, although Hirivskaya says some critics believed it glamorised the drug trade."(Critics) were saying: 'It looks so beautiful but in the real world it's not so beautiful,"' says Hirivskaya, who will be a guest of the festival.For Nicholas Maksymow, director of the annual festival, Vice is among his favourites of the 21 films featured in this year's program.Maksymow, who is a friend of Todorovsky, says: "Valery told me that the bodies that are fighting drug corruption in Russia at the moment actually put funding into his film, which I think is probably positive."The festival, while keen to tap into the strengths of Russian drama, also offers a variety of films that have garnered awards and critical praise at screenings around the world, Maksymow says.Big-ticket items for this year's event include a seven-film retrospective of director Karen Shaknazarov as well as the Australian premiere of his latest work, Vanished Empire.Russian Resurrection is at Palace Cinema Como until November 5.russianresurrection.com for details
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