Generation P

Vavilen Tatarsky studied at the literary institute; he was going to be a poet. The Soviet Union is breaking up and poetry no longer answers to anything. He works at a kiosk. Then an old acquaintance gives him a job: he will write advertising copy. Western brands are coming to Russia and none of them knows the language here. Tatarsky writes slogans and the work catches on. He rises. He joins an agency and learns there what the real work is: politicians are produced too, the people seen on television are made digitally, and there is no actual government. Victor Ginzburg directs. Vladimir Yepifantsev plays Tatarsky; Mikhail Efremov, Andrei Panin and Sergey Shnurov are in the cast. It is a Russian production. The source is Victor Pelevin's novel, published in 1999 and counted among the essential texts describing the nineties in Russia. The adaptation took a long time; the production spread over years and had difficulties with financing. The matter it treats is the language of advertising; the film shows it not as a trade but as the production of reality. The narrative takes Russia's transition in the nineties as a direct subject; money, organised crime and television are parts of the same order. The film uses real brand names and real advertisements of the period. At a certain point the narrative becomes entirely fantastic and the boundary of the real is dropped. Its limit is accessibility; without the book the narrative is scattered and the references dense. Who it is for: viewers who like Russian cinema and satirical science fiction. Who it is not for: it is scattered, the references local, and the ending closed.