Hipsters

Moscow in the fifties. Komsomol squads raid at night; the targets are young people who listen to jazz and dress in colour. Mels is in one of those squads. During a raid he sees a girl and follows her. Polza is inside that circle. Mels changes sides. He gets his hair done, finds a jacket, tries to buy a saxophone. His old friends expel him. His family does not understand. While the narrative runs as a love story there is also a fact: the America these young people are imitating never existed. Valery Todorovsky directs. Anton Shagin plays Mels and Oksana Akinshina plays Polza; Maksim Matveev is in the cast. It is a Russian production, made in 2008. The film is a musical; the songs are taken from the Soviet rock and pop repertoire and rearranged. Its ground is a real subculture; the young people called stilyagi existed in the Soviet fifties and were punished for how they dressed. Colour is an instrument inside it; the crowd is grey and the stilyagi are shot in colour. The film won awards in Russia and did well at the box office. The matter it treats is the pressure to conform; the film gives it not through a political speech but through a choice of clothes. The narrative does not idealise its hero; Mels's knowledge is shallow and he does not know what he is imitating. The final scene connects to the present and opens the film's argument. Its limit is length; the narrative is long, the musical sections repeat, and the ending is open. Who it is for: viewers who like musicals and narratives of the Soviet period. Who it is not for: it is long, repetitive, and the ending sad.