MOVIE REVIEW : Russian Town With a Subversive Secret

Did rock ‘n’ roll do more than Ronald Reagan, economics or power politics to bring the Stalinist system down? The subversive power of rockabilly, the anti-authoritarian impact of early Elvis Presley and Bill Haley: Those are the secret propositions under the dark comic miasma of “City Zero” (Monica Showcase).

The setting is a nightmarish Russian town on the edge of nowhere: a town wreathed in cold mist, that you can barely reach by train, and where, maddeningly, you can’t leave again, even when you want to. The roads simply stop at the edge of a forest.

In this “Twilight Zone-ish” cul-de-sac, a nervous engineer named Varakin (Leonid Filatov) tries to stay cool at the maddest occurences: a secretary calmly typing away in the nude at the air-conditioning plant he’s come to investigate; a cake suddenly wheeled over, with the chef’s compliments, shaped and iced in the image of his own face; a photograph that erroneously identifies him as the son of an apparent suicide victim.

Varakin’s poker face is the persona of a man trapped in a totalitarian society. And the best one or two scenes here are almost worthy of Bunuel, full of stylized comic dread and lucidly rendered madness. Everything that goes on in “City Zero” is crazy, but it all has a pattern. Rock ‘n’ roll came to the town back in 1957, was suppressed by the authorities, but won the hearts of the populace, who regard it as their symbol of freedom.

The guilt we can’t escape, the madness of society: That’s the essence of “City Zero.” On the outskirts, there’s an ancient tree of “political regeneration” where the branches are rotten. Rock remains a wonderful dark secret and, somehow, against his will, Varakin becomes the center of that cult: the surrogate idol, reluctant witch-priest of that sacred rotten tree’s Golden Rockin’ Bough.

It’s a humorous film, but its humor is deceptively low-key and surreal, sheened in a kind of comic cold sweat that keeps icing over as you watch. Director Karen Shakhnazarov stages most of his scenes in old-fashioned medium camera setups, as if the story was an unfolding tableau in a museum or in adjoining rooms in a dollhouse. There actually is a museum in the film: a wax chamber, commemorating the Night the Music Died.

Shakhnazarov centered a movie around Western music before--1983’s “Jazzman,” a picaresque tale of a Soviet jazz band in the ‘30s--and he’s alive to the irony that, though rock was denounced by Soviet authorities as decadent capitalist culture, actually, like jazz, it was entertainment for the masses. (It might have made more sense to ban Mantovani.)

But though “City Zero” (Times rated: Mature, for nudity) won the Grand Prize at the Chicago Film Festival, like “Little Vera” and several other post- glasnost films, it’s slightly overrated; the exhilaration of speaking your mind sometimes works against art’s alchemy. The movie would be better if it disguised itself more, kept its meanings hovering on the edge of the unspeakable--if everything in it had the macabre surprise of that scene with the cake shaped like the hero’s head, that moment when we watch the waiter’s knife, calmly slicing out a chunk between his frosted nose and his chocolate brow.