Moro (Viktor Tsoi) in Igla
Igla (Игла, The Needle) is a film which I found more interesting on account of its reverberations in later Kazakh cinema than on its own merits. A 1988 ‘Kazakh New Wave’ contemporary of Mest’ and Otyrardyń kúıreýi, Igla does not in the same way dwell on grand questions of fate and identity; however, it unfortunately more than makes up for that by way of pretentious art-film mannerisms and postmodernist meandering. There’s something significant in the fact that the other two films here explicitly centre Kazakh film within an East Asian ambit; tying Kazakh destiny to both historical Mongol domination and contemporary Soviet-Korean ‘lostness’. Here, musician-turned-leading-man Viktor Tsoi, himself of Soviet-Korean descent, seems to embody a part of that ‘lostness’, no matter whether he occupies a Russian or a Kazakh cultural milieu. But whereas for Chae Sungu in Mest’, his lostness carried with it shame and emasculation; Tsoi’s character here wears that same lostness as a badge of honour and masculine pride. Igla balances Tsoi’s rock-star-sized ego and prima donna on-screen presence against Nugmanov’s desire to ‘play around’ with the filmic medium, and the result is something that is a bit more than the sum of its parts. (Rather disappointing is the inexplicable lack of hedgehogs in the film, though.)
In Igla, a drifter named Moro (Viktor Tsoi) comes to Alma-Ata to collect on a debt owed to him by a small-time crook and part-time factory worker named Spartak (Aleksandr Bashirov). Not having a place to stay, he drops in on his ex-girlfriend Dina (Marina Smirnova), whom he quickly discovers is addicted to morphine. Moro decides to help Dina kick the habit with a trip to the Aral Sea, but soon finds himself on the wrong side of a drug-smuggling gang led by a hospital surgeon named Artur (Petr Mamonov), who is the one who got Dina addicted in the first place. The two plots collide with Moro in the middle.
There’s not all that much more to the story than that; it’s a short film, and much of it lingers on extended sequences in Dina’s apartment or else on the Aral Sea, which has been turned into a desert. In addition to this modern man-made desert, dingy block apartments, rusty chain-link fences and abandoned parks form the backdrop for much of the film. Nugmanov enjoys linking these extended sequences either with close-ups of a digital clock showing the time, or with white century text on black title cards. Very often radio or television programmes are playing in the background, and key events in the plot are often narrated or ‘foreshadowed’ by what the television is broadcasting at the time, adding to an almost paranoid sense of surrealism. The core message of the film – insofar as it even has one, which is somewhat doubtful – is very much anti-drug. However, it portrays morphine abuse and its effects in candid ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier Soviet cinema. Further small eccentric touches, like the occasional animated scrawls that indicate a character’s thought process (as they occasionally do in, say, James Gunn’s Super or, indeed, Baikonur and Absurdistan), add to the countercultural feel of the movie.
Also interesting is that the Soviet state is rendered a nearly-absent presence, passive and almost invisible – I say ‘almost’ because the sole representations of Soviet government apparatus or ideology present themselves through the near-ubiquitous televisions that Nugmanov either places in the frame or has playing in the background. (Igla’s ending title card is an ironic dedication to ‘Soviet television’.) They serve almost as a ‘chorus’ to the main action, which happens in a heavily-stylised, almost caricatured criminal underworld. The soundtrack is shared between these television ‘samples’, and contemporary rock music – mostly from Viktor Tsoi’s own band Kino.
Igla is really mostly about Viktor Tsoi, though, and what he represented to a generation of Russian youth. Tsoi is to Russian culture what Cui Jian 崔健 is and has been to Chinese culture. Moro, Tsoi’s alter-ego in the film, is a mullet-rocking, jeans-wearing leather-clad ‘bad boy’, a Byronic anti-hero, often seen wearing shades and with a cigarette flopping out of his mouth. He gestures with his middle finger and says ‘fuck’ a lot. He is – almost more so than any other filmic Russian protagonist I can think of, off the top of my head – instantly recognisable and sympathetic to an American audience: he is the avatar of an alienated, rebellious and cynical youth culture. He even pulled a James Dean two years later and died in an auto wreck, lending him personally (and his performance in this film particularly, which was his last) a martyrific mystique.
There are a number of comparisons that can be made here. Igla has the counterculture cult-film appeal of Repo Man and, a bit more distantly, the hapkido-filled rage of Billy Jack. It anticipates the cynical thematic sensibility of Trainspotting and the subversively genre-savvy wink-nods of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It sounds like I’m talking it up a bit too much, though, with these comparisons. Igla has its own cult-film brilliance, but it’s much more rough, experimental and protean than any of these comparisons would suggest. It took me about halfway through the film for me to figure out quite what it was up to.
Igla’s influence on later Kazakh cinema, though – particularly in the crime-thriller subgenre – gives it an importance and a place of honour there which director Rashid Nugmanov had no reason to expect when he made it. Aqan Sataev’s Réketır pays explicit homage to Igla in multiple scenes; including the shell game scene and even the ambiguous ending. Gúl’shad Omarova’s Shıza also plays up the Viktor Tsoi cigarette-smoking black-leather-and-sunglasses æsthetic with its own definitively young leading man – though it does so with its tongue firmly in its cheek. If Ivan groznyi is the stately forefather of Kazakh cinema, then Igla is almost certainly the black sheep of the family. But it’s a family member that can’t be ignored.
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