Edited at home in Moscow by a director under house arrest, Leto is a 2018 movie about life in the Soviet era made by a director living in “democratic” Russia. Any read-across is obviously entirely accidental.
Leto means Summer in Russian but this is a spring/autumn tale of a USSR rock star called Mike, his pretty partner Natasha and new kid on the block Viktor. It’s the early 1980s, the New Wave is making inroads into the tightly patrolled Soviet music scene and Mike is adapting to the new sounds/era with a nip here, a tuck there – really he’s an old school long-haired rock guy in the mould of Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople.
Then Viktor arrives on the scene. Younger, more sensitive, more open, better looking and a more talented songwriter than Mike, Viktor is soon locked into a strange threeway dance with Mike and Natasha, who have been, until now, the rock-solid rock couple. An as-in-art-so-in-life tussle on the downlow develops, with Natasha the prize. Imagine A Star Is Born, done rock-style.
Director Kirill Serebrennikov shoots it like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, handheld and in black and white, with strange eruptions here and there of fantasy sequences, like when everyone on a train breaks into the Talking Heads song Psycho Killer. Later, on a bus, there’s a rendition of Iggy Pop’s The Passenger (“and I ride and I ride”). Meanwhile, the screen is breaking out into the sort of pops and fizzy animated lines you’d associate with a 1990s supergeek movie.
The Russian rockocracy didn’t like the movie much. That’s partly because Serebrennikov and his co-writers are playing fast and (very loose) with the life of Viktor Tsoi, a Soviet-era rock star who founded the band Kino (as Viktor does in this film). Rocker Boris Grebenshchikov, the likely model for Mike, called the film “a lie from beginning to end”.
But to those with little or no knowledge of the Soviet rock scene it’s a fascinating look at what life might have been like. The picture it paints of the Leningrad Rock Club, where musicians have to attend pre-gig meetings with gatekeepers and satisfy them that their songs are in keeping with the general thrust of Communist Party principles, is amusing and sinister in equal measure. And we get the idea that rock musicians in the USSR really suffered for their art. Playing music associated with the decadent west made them social pariahs. Plus there’s the sense of the frustration of the musicians – they are receiving the latest albums by David Bowie or Lou Reed and so on but cannot directly influence the rock culture that influences them.
Talking of which, there is simply too much music in this movie that’s of an indifferent quality – Mike’s self-indulgent preachy sub-Dylan stuff mostly. But you cannot doubt the commitment of the cast. Mike is played by a real rock musicican, Roma Zver (real name Roman Bilyk) of the band Zveri, and he is effortlessly right as the 1970s guy who’s failing to transition to the 1980s. Why don’t you ever take the shades off, someone asks Mike. Quite.
Irina Starshenbaum I have not seen before but she makes a smart and very likeable Natasha. The script doesn’t give her a whole lot to do, but Starshenbaum makes it count. As the charismatic Viktor there’s the charismatic Teo Yoo, the Korean actor who’d later go on to star in Past Lives (one of 2023’s best movies).
Popping up now and again is Aleksandr Kuznetsov, brilliant star of Why Don’t You Just Die!, who acts as a commentary on events. In the train carriage Psycho Killer sequence, for instance, he holds up a sign reading “This did not happen”.
Distancing devices like this, as well as the fantasy breakouts and the on-screen squiggles deliberately undermine any claims to truth-telling that the documentary style might be making. They also slightly undermine the movie emotionally. We observe but we’re never really let in. Pity. It’s a good story.
Leto aka Summer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
