Soviet Heteronormative Masculine Transition In Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains
“The short-lived culture of optimism and limitless opportunities was over. A culture of pessimism and cynicism set in.”
(Sandfort & Stulhofer, 2004)
The introduction of the two protagonists of Sergei Bodrov’s 1996 Prisoner of the Mountains can be read as representative reflection of differing states of masculine gendered performance transition during the post-Soviet transformation of the early nineties. Ivan and Sacha are the same Russian male, but at different stages of evolution and adaptation. Ivan is the familial-oriented, optimistic, and hopeful boy of the period immediately following the collapse of state socialism. Sacha the cynical, confident Russian man which swiftly results.
We open on a distant rural exterior shot of a truck loaded with men moving left to right as black smoke of an unknown origin rises on the horizon. Triumphant military music is heard in the distance. The camera pans from outside to inside, and as our eyes adjust to the changing light, they’re also tested with an optical examination and the echoes of a patient slowly reading off the letters of a Snellen chart. The doctor, distracted, multitasks the examination over lunch and orders “cover your right eye”, where the camera cuts to a close-up of a young male patient, Ivan, switching a paddle from his left to right eye. He continues to read as the nurse counts off the rows of letters with a stick.
As Ivan begins to strain, the optician leans in for a closer look, ends the exam, and marks his paperwork in close-up as ‘fit to serve’. Dismissed with “there’s no use sitting here”, the camera follows Ivan in his role as naked proto soldier as he exits into a sterile corridor, where he is joined by other naked young men, who homogenously cup themselves and walk briskly behind a female nurse. Some of them smile and the air hums with awkward, anxious conversation. They round the corner into a new room where others just like them are being weighed, measured, and evaluated. One anonymously asks “Comrade Major, where will we be stationed?” The barked response “wherever your country sends you” ends the conversation before it begins.
The young men bunch and form a line, their flesh blurring together in front of a tired, seated doctor who is performing physical evaluations. Ivan is instructed to sit up, sit down, rotate, and respond to the doctor’s requests. His genitals are examined. It tickles. Again, a paper is signed.
A starkly sharp cut from the sterile white interior space of the infirmary takes us to the dark, headlit point-of-view exterior of a closed border gate, where we jump in time as well as visibility and familiarity. As the gate creaks open, an off-camera voice yells “wake up, guys!”. The headlights illuminate the face of Ivan, who is now an armed soldier. We switch from the first-person view of the front of the truck to a reverse shot of an older soldier, perched on the truck’s front bumper, whistling. A carton of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka weigh down his disheveled, unbuttoned military fatigues. As the truck passes a tank covered in relaxing soldiers, the carton is thrown to them with the salutation “here is your grenade!”
The truck arrives back at camp, our older protagonist jumps off, and announces his return to a commanding officer, who idly plays billiards and drinks outside under a floodlit table. The contraband vodka is opened and poured directly into the officer’s cup which nestles conveniently in the center pocket. The two toast to their health, and as voices swell in the distance, our returning protagonist asks, “why are they shouting?” before picking up his AK-47 and firing into the barracks. We are treated to a slow close-up of the rifle barrel as it unloads, and an even slower pan up towards the laughing, delighted face of Sacha, our second protagonist. A subdued, solitary voice begins to sing, the chess pieces now introduced, and the scene is set for the film to begin.
Sacha and Ivan are men of contrast. Sacha’s confident, worldly, careless, and connected. An individual. Ivan’s nervous, inexperienced, hopeful and one of a faceless collective. Sacha whistles as gates open for him, returning favors with contraband and intimate with authority. Ivan is lost in the background noise, his youth homogenized into the soup of required civic military service against ethnic agitation. Sacha’s been in the world for years, Ivan’s only just emerged from the sterile womb of training, still the raw material being shaped from boy to man and leaving the cocoon of the state.
We can read Ivan and Sacha as the same individual in different stages of post-Soviet masculine evolution. If Ivan is the youthful, immediate post-collapse enthusiasm and hopeful promise of perestroika, Sacha exhibits the highly individualized resilience, adaptability, and connection towards which Russian men needed to transition (Pesmen, 2000). The boundary of being able to thrive in the resultant unfamiliar new culture of capitalism, commercialism, and updated means of gender roles, responsibilities, and performance (Platt, 2022). Ivan is the hope of a brighter future, perhaps the future Russia deserves. Sacha’s the future Russia actually gets.
Notions of masculinity changed drastically in early nineties Russia, where definitions of maleness adjusted to one’s ability to navigate a new commercial reality and build economic capacity (Platt, 2022). The ‘new uncertainty and increasing hardships pushed men into a masculine anomie’ (Sandfort & Stulhofer, 2004). To be able to defend one’s interests, often with corrupt and violent means. Sacha’s complicit in his corruption, but his criminal behavior is visibly tolerated, and the strength of his relationships even permit him to fire on his own men. Sacha starkly reflects the early nineties’ increased individualism ‘often synonymous with embezzlement, materialism and cynicism’ (Sandfort & Stulhofer, 2004).
Ivan and Sacha are different points on the same timeline of masculine maturity inside of the post-Soviet transitional era. Ivan as representative of that briefest of moments where optimism, hope and the release from state socialism brought the promise of a prosperous, thriving future. And Sacha as personification of post-collapse krutit’sia (Pesmen, 2000), relational intimacy, commercial corruption, cynicism, and confidence which prevailed in a new culture of male anomie. Bodrov’s film has the optimistic and resourceful Ivan prevail, and the cynical Sacha murdered at the hands of ethnic rebels. A commentary in 1996 of a positive future perhaps not entirely lost, and still within grasp in the near history of the past.
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