Dimitry Kubasov: Alekhin
Kubasov is one of the directors behind ”Winter, Go Home”, a graduate from the school of Marina Razbezhkina. This film, I can see from the end titles, comes from the same source and deals with the writer Evgeny Alekhin (photo), talented writer and desperado, in opposition to the system and its politics and in conflict with himself, wanting to write the big Russian novel at the same title as he in a consequent way takes whatever drug and alcohol to get away from it all. In the film he is with his girlfriend Oksana, who is part of the self-destruction aggressive environment they live in. I cant’t see from the film if they have a child together, or if it is his child, but there is a sweet scene where Alekhin reads Kafka to the baby, in the flat where most of the very intimate situations between the couple take place, with cut-in’s of Alekhin singing/rapping his texts in the band he plays with, or scenes with him totally stoned in the metro.
I know it is another time, another background, and they are older, the couple in this film but – with words from Juris Podnieks in 1984: is it easy to be young? Apparently not for a Rimbaud character as is Alekhin – is he a valid representative for a Russian artist generation that sees no hope and acts increasingly self-destructive? “I want to be a dead, stupid cunt”, as one of his pals says to the camera.
Russia, 43 mins., 2013
