Red Hot (1993): Youth, Love, Rock and Roll, KGB

Good midnight, Moon Dogs! It’s time to howl at the stars and about the cinema! Since the Cold War, Hollywood movie companies have been pelting their viewers with images of “evil Russians” like monkeys with pebbles. These pleasures became available to the citizens of the USSR with the advent of video salons, one of the signs of Perestroika. And the weak attempts of the same “masters” to show the Soviet Man in a positive light turned into outright buffoonery, as in the “Red Heat” with a cyborg in a police uniform. But were there any people in the Imperialist West who tried to create an adequate picture of Soviet reality without slipping into boredom and grotesqueness?

Let’s take the example of a 1993 film about youth, love, rock’n’roll and KGB – Red Hot (don’t confuse it with “Red Heat”!). Paul Haggis, the screenwriter of “Million Dollar Baby,” “Casino Royale,” “Letters from Iwo Jima,” made his directorial debut with this particular film. He’ll be back in the director’s chair 13 years later, immediately snatching a couple of Oscars for “Clash.” But in ’93, Haggis left his native Canada to film in Riga, the capital of Latvia. In hot pursuit, the Union collapsed just two years ago.

It’s hard to say what prompted him to break away from the creation of “Cool Walker,” but the plot was chosen for a non-trivial one – the birth of rock in the Latvian SSR during Khrushchev’s “thaw.” Pete Anderson, a true legend and mastodon of Soviet-Baltic rockabilly, was invited as a consultant to the shooting, and many fragments of his memories were included in the script. Eighteen-year-old Balthazar, the “golden boy” of the Getty dynasty, was already quite an experienced actor by that time, although his really big work, “Highway to Nowhere,” would happen only four years later.

Anyway, what about the movie? A hammer and sickle are burning on a black screen to the accompaniment of Elvis: Riga, 1959. Alexey Fradis (Getty) is a graduate student at a music school, the son and nephew of musicians, and himself a gifted instrumentalist and composer. He’s studying for himself, about to enter the conservatory, when Uncle Dmitry (Armin Muller-Stahl), damn him, returns from another voyage, throws his nephew a pack of American rock and roll records. It is difficult to use a censorious word to convey the range of emotions reflected on Alexey’s face when he first listened to Little Richard.

Young Balthazar is very organic in his role. Imbued with new music and alarming the neighbors, our hero rushes to share the discovery with his school friend Sasha. Sasha, don’t be a fool, copies all the plates on X-rays. The process of re-recording music on the “bones” is shown in the picture in detail and in detail, which in itself is unique. Well, Alexander begins to deftly fart copies, plunging Fradis into a panic. In a state of passion, Alexey gets on the bus, along the way stupidly losing the Jerry Lee Lewis single “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”. A passing policeman stumbles upon the wreckage of the record, and the flywheel of the anti-“corrupting influence” machine starts (a little-known fact is that in the USA of the 50s, rock and roll were being fought as a “communist infection”).

Meanwhile, our friends are putting together a rockabilly quartet, where Alexey is the guitarist, Sasha is playing the piano, and two more are playing double bass and drums. The rehearsal base is the premises of a closed factory, the instruments were illegally removed from the music school. At the same time, Alexey undertakes to improve the academic performance of his classmate Valentina (charming Carla Gugino). The only catch is that Valya is the daughter of the main KGB officer Kirov, whose role is played by Donald Sutherland, who is equally convincing both in the role of a loving father and in the role of the “red inquisitor.” But the brutality of the internal organs in the picture is “slightly” exaggerated, and a certain investigator Gurevich, who is trying to sit in on his boss Kirov, is completely depicted like any bad cop in any cheap American action movie, an informant is “stylish” attached.

Carla Gugino also looks foreign, whose image of a femme fatale from noir stories is far from a seventeen-year-old Soviet schoolgirl, albeit from high society. Although sometimes you forget about it, like when Valya was listening to Alyosha’s gift, the recording of Sonny James’ “Young Love”. Alexey, by not stopping playing rock and roll and giving banned recordings to the daughter of a KGB general, is bringing an inexorable and disastrous denouement closer.

In its mood and problematic, Haggis’s film echoes such domestic films as Pavel Chukhrai’s “Driver for Faith” and Peter Todorovsky’s “What a Wonderful Game.” And, despite the obvious rough edges of the script and direction, it looks much more serious than the grimacing “Dudes” of Todorovsky Jr. The Western director’s attempt to capture a country and era so alien to him turned out to be sincere and successful: proper music, attention to many everyday details – the movie will pleasantly surprise fans of rockabilly and recent Russian history. Watch good movies and avoid the hack, guys!