Aleksei Balabanov's "Brother" (1997)

Often considered the central auteur of the post-Soviet era, filmmaker Alexei Balabanov was responsible for creating the ultimate cultural symbol of the so-called “Wild Nineties.” His two-part crime drama Brother (Brat, 1997) and Brother 2 (Brat 2, 2000) presents a morally ambiguous anti-hero Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov Jr.), a demobilized Chechen war soldier returning to his hometown of St. Petersburg to help his older brother fend off a rival mafia gang. In the first film in particular, Balabanov relies on folklore in assembling his surprisingly likeable cold-blooded killer: merging the Russian folktale trope of Ivan-the-Fool with a noir-style vigilante assassin. Danila personifies the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union with his music preferences serving as its central metaphor. A crucial element of Danila’s characterization is the fact that he is a hopelessly devoted fan of the Russian rock band Nautilus Pompilius, whose songs populate both films’ soundtracks. The ambivalence in Danila’s character as both a ruthless murderer and a goofy provincial simpleton is largely negotiated in the film through music. Balabanov engineers a moral conflict between the author-narrator and his protagonist by contrasting the songs Danila actively hears and those used for cinematic narration of his violent actions. Both Brother and its sequel strategically capitalize on Soviet-era rock, referencing the cinematic rock hero trope that was developed by Solov’ev and Nugmanov for Viktor Tsoi [#00128, #00127]. In contrast to the Perestroika rock film, however, Balabanov ultimately works to dethrone the rock star on screen to reflect the socioeconomic decay in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. Balabanov positions his films as cultural products made in an acutely post-Soviet context, within which the optimism of Perestroika-era reforms gives way to poverty, disillusionment, violence, and crime. The promise of the late-Soviet rock star as an emblem of change is subsumed by the plight of the common man in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, who like Danila may possess heroic ambitions, but whose immediate environment forces him to fight for survival with the only means available: crime and violence.