Dead Man's Bluff (2005)

 

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov and Stas Mokhnachev

Cast: Aleksey Panin as Sergey; Dmitriy Dyuzhev as Simon; Nikita Mikhalkov as Sergey Mikhaylovich; Sergey Makovetskiy as Koron; Anatoliy Zhuravlyov as Bala; Grigoriy Siyatvinda as Eggplant

Ephemeral Wave

 

The films of Aleksey Balabanov are a conflicting collection for me, especially as I have had to rapidly ingest most of them in a small space of time. It is not helped most of Balabanov's career is not readily available, which complicates a director known for many for Brother (1997) alone. His cinema is frankly nihilistic, a complexity between how much of his career is a bleak neutral gaze over the world, of Russia over its history as a Russian filmmaker, and whether the many moments which are offense, un-pc and transgressive are just sincere and meant to accepted.

Thing is, you can accuse even very popular films, specifically Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), which this felt comparable to, and finds aspects, of its violent nihilistic characters and edgy content, especially the dialogue, which are questionable in context, and Dead Man's Bluff does least bookend itself with a sense it is a nihilistic satire where even likable characters are still bastards, even racist and sadist ones, set in a parody of Balabanov's own two Brother films. Here, it sets up this visibly when you start in a classroom full of students where the female teacher explains how, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs of Russia from the nineties came to be because of pyramid schemes which conned people out of money. Then there is an immediate cut to a charming disposer of bodies, back in the nineties, kindly explaining to a victim tied in a chair he has a chance to die quickly, all because the killer is a nice guy with a daughter in school, all transpiring in a morgue full of nude male and female corpses.

This is an ugly film from the start, but you have the issue of how you gauge Balabanov's world and characters. A trio accidentally steal a case full of drugs, whilst the two who were carrying it, minor bandits Serega (Aleksey Panin) and Simon (Dmitriy Dyuzhev), are sent by their boss to recover it back. The film has a tone of coolness, which raises a concern that this is glorifying itself. It is notable though, throughout his career, that for the problematic touches of nationalism in his career, Aleksey Balabanov will however undercut this with the ways he depicts the history of Russia and its culture. In this case, this is ugly from the start but loaded on purpose, when we have three bumbling individuals who will make the ill-advised mistake to steal drugs that will doom them. The trio of bumbling individuals includes an Afro-Russian man the other two are incredibly racist to, jokes directed at him involving claims he is from Ethiopia to his annoyance, and will be continued by others. Our leads, two brothers, are not nice people either despite how they are placed structurally in the film as the ones we follow and technically sympathise with. They are low on the pecking order, and viewed by their own boss as bumbling fools, on the bottom of the peeking order and likely considering to find a new way forth in life; even if I initially found Simon a charming lug of a killer, even he shows his racism later on, which emphasises the moral quandary Balabanov's work force one to have, asking for what is deliberate and what is painted. 

This is something that has to be considered with all of Balabanov's films, as here in this case, Dead Man's Bluff is an intentionally broad farce, one which contrasts its bleak humour with extreme violence. The title comes from a forced game of Russian Roulette that is played as a sick joke, when there is already enough bodies in the apartment where this has transpires beforehand. The deaths are just as nasty to witness even if some are done for humour, and the humour itself makes these characters even more broad. Everything is absurd from the get-go, be it a shoebox of hastily collected coke, when Sergey and Simon botch a strong-arming of a new drug developer by killing him, to the leads' boss himself. The later is someone with a comb over and bright pinkish red suit when introduced, someone who loves his young son so much he not only has him nearby mid-business meetings, at one point in his own blue suit building a cemetery with (licensed) Lego blocks, but even brings him to the morgue from the early scenes where corpses are. A trainee surgeon who is dressed like a punk, or the trio of bumbling doomed fools, the one mocked for his ethnicity at least managing to bring a horde of military hardware to a simple robbery of a briefcase, emphasises that this is ridiculous from the get-go.

That it undercuts its coolness with problematic characters and sickening violence is arguably more moral, as it could be so easy to retell this story in an American film where characters can be repainted as the cool "likable" gangsters. The narrative is simple - the briefcase of drugs is stolen, with Sergey and Simon having to retrieve it back - but in context, the tone as with the rest of his career has Aleksey Balabanov painting a grim image of Russia even if his cinema has moments which are uncomfortable, seen or heard in dialogue, to have. His, as a key figure of post-Soviet Russian filmmaking, is a distinct depiction of his country even in this crime farce, from the vending machines that offer a glass cup to an animal exhibit that offers patrons the ability to feed live rats to a crocodile, an ultimately lazy one, for five roubles per rat. He also depicts a world, as in many of his films, with casual racism, people in general as disposable corpses, as even a neighbour just concerned about noises getting plugged at one point in a wardrobe at one point here, and that the sheds of humanity from Sergey and Simon are still from individuals who are merciless and live in a dog-eat-dog world.

The Tarantino comparison is apt, but especially with his first two films, it does make one question some of the choices that Tarantino made in his movies in that early period without the farcical and cruel nature Dead Man's Bluff exhibits. The comparison is apt more so as, in mind to Reservoir Dog's famous ear cutting sequence, this has an equivalent which is played for a sick joke but with the least expected use of a Sparks song possible. That this ends, part of the bookmarks, with a happy ending with legal business, finding success, good suits and having an office with a female secretary you can grope, does raise the question of whether you were meant to like the characters. However, in itself, it offers a pretty damning joke that criminals can just wander into legitimate business and no one bats an eye, thinking of the opening prologue in the classroom. Dead Man's Bluff, for its dangerous game of uncomfortable content, some openly played for humour, is at least playing this game with the punch lines being something as damning as imaging business being full of legitimate criminals.