Cinema of the Abstract: The Needle (1988)

Sunday 6 October 2019

The Needle (1988)

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Director: Rashid Nugmanov

Screenplay: Aleksandr Baranov and Bakhyt Kilibayev

Cast: Viktor Tsoi as Moro; Marina Smirnova as Dina; Aleksandr Bashirov as Spartak; Pyotr Mamonov as Artur Yusupovich

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

The Needle qualifies as a unique venture - Rashid Nugmanov, a Kazakh director, would remake Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven as the 1993 "Ostern" called The Wild East before becoming a political activist against his country's president Nursultan Nazarbayev whilst living in France, and its star Viktor Tsoi would tragically die in a car crash only 2 years later. Tsoi also happened to be the lead singer and lyricalist of the Soviet post-post band Kino, whose music scores The Needle and were an influential band in Russian music; Tsoi became an idol into the modern age, probably as much due to his abrupt death at only twenty eight years old but because of Kino's reputation too.

He looks like a post punk James Dean and whilst his acting is mannered, you couldn't have chosen the right person but Tsoi to star as an enigmatic wander named Moro who returns to find his girlfriend Dina (Marina Smirnova) on drugs and helping to peddle them. Lightning was caught in a bottle with The Needle as, in the former Soviet Union, this became a cult film preserved as an important historical artefact decades later. Honestly, when I first saw The Needle years ago I hated it, not prepared for films whose narrative thrusts like this one's which are more looser in tone, something I forgot returning to the movie and greatly appreciating much more now. Opening with a narrator who spells out the artifice of the world in front of the audience, it plays off as a gritty punk fantasy, playing in how everything is depicted.

That Moro returns in his girlfriend's life, crossing paths with a drug selling doctor and Mono taking her to the desert-like Aral Sea to go cold turkey, told in a form more concerned with telling the tale in images and a lot of directorial choices which are non-linear even in a linear narrative. It neither comes off as merely ironic either which is a surprise, an earnest coolness to The Needle which is found just in the music by Kino. The edginess of this film has softened over the years, but when characters just casually inject themselves with needles, it would've probably been a shock to witness, as is how the scenes of Tsoi using martial arts chops to fight off multiple men at once vastly contrasting the stereotypical image of Soviet Union art house cinema but having a genre energy to it. Yet it it's also sincere and wears a heart on its sleeve, how undeniably some of the images shot are beautiful, such as finding a husk of a ship in the middle of the desert or the snow covered path in the final scene.

This is a very urban, hostile world onscreen where even a public bathing/swimming pool for one person looks like it's in an underground bunker, but it's also certainly of the time in a enticing way, a reminder that long after the punk movement deflated in the late seventies in Britain, cinema in particular in the eighties got a shot in the arm of fascinating aesthetics in cinema like this let alone in the English speaking countries. Tsoi himself as a filmmaker also adds very unconventional stylistic touches he deserves praise for, usually involving television in that alongside the narrator he has sound bites from TV interject in the material as if emotional motifs. In general, the film doesn't lie that it is a cinematic construct and plays off this even in the last audio you heard after the end credits.

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However, as mentioned, it still contains a lot of personality. The music, its lyrics especially, are earnest odes to one's own individuality in an optimistic way. There's also the background details to consider, notably that Tsoi was Soviet-Korean, whose family from his father's side connects to a large Korean immigrant population in Soviet states, never in the slightest part of the plot but, alongside an older man he encounters in the desert and friends (and drug peddlers) in the cast played by Korean actors, is a huge cultural mark that can be sadly neglected when we just presume Soviet Union cinema just involves Russian cinema. Kazakhstan had a New Wave in the late eighties of their own, and it's interesting that alongside The Needle the other film that helped start it is the impressive masterpiece Revenge (1989), explicitly starting in ancient Korean before following a Korean character, part of the "Koryo-saram" of Koreans in Soviet countries like Kazakhstan, in a morally complicated story of revenge, thus really reminding one beyond the films themselves cinema is a huge cultural text in everyone who works in front of and behind the camera.

Also the mere fact I am calling this a Kazakh film than Soviet is important; Kazakhstan in particular for me, growing as an adult in the 2000s, has unfortunately been undermined by Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat character, which played off a stereotype that is offensive, to which a film like this and a character like Moro drastically challenges for the better in its modernity. Generally, the growing campaign in recognition of the individual countries part of the Soviet Union in cinema is a vital necessity, be it learning Man With A Movie Camera (1929) is being claimed as an Ukrainian film due to where it is shot or making sure this significant cult gem The Needle gets preserved.

This is more poignant as, finally being able to see a good looking version of the aforementioned Needle, it's a damn good film, whose mix of shooting in late eighties urban locations, even an abandoned zoo environment for a curious encounter, is matched by overtly stylish mythologizing, as Tsoi himself let alone the character is played literally as an immortal wanderer. It still feels modern, still hip, whilst a time capsule, the music of Kino just adding to the strengths of the film by adding evocative music and lyrics. [Thankfully, the version I saw had English subtitles for the songs too, adding so much more context].

If anything, it does add sadness that, never hearing of Kino's music barring here, Tsoi did die as abruptly as he did, a figure made immortal here with a sincere charm. The point that [Spoiler Warning] he shrugs off a stabbing and neuters a tragic ending and [Spoiler Ends] Moro never shows any sense he's in danger is not a detraction, merely symbolising the wandering hero of mythology and multiple cultures in the past, here a real life cool figure in his trench coat who wanders off in the background in the snow. Real life sadly took him just in 1990 but Tsoi, thanks to Rashid Nugmanov and the production, lived on and The Needle is in dire need of being better known.