'Brother': Wild West? Nyet, St. Petersburg

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
The New York Times


If you believe the portrait of St. Petersburg presented by Aleksei Balabanov's terrifically stylish gangster film "Brother," the former Leningrad has become a lawless, shoot-'em-up frontier town in the post-Soviet era. While the city's rootless youths clutch voraciously at the cheesiest elements of Western pop culture, warring outlaw factions have turned the city into an Eastern European version of 1930s Chicago.

The film's central character, Danila (Sergei Bodrov Jr.), is a baby-faced young hoodlum who arrives in town fresh out of the army and goes to work for his brother Viktor (Viktor Suhorukov), who runs a murder-for-hire business connected to the feuding Russian mafia.

By the end of the film, Danila, a sleepy-eyed dolt obsessed with a mediocre Russian rock band named Nautilus, has cut a lethal swath through the city's underworld and is ready to move on to greener pastures, namely Moscow.

During his stay in St. Petersburg, Danila meets Kat (Mariya Zhukova), a Russian version of a New York club kid who hangs out at McDonald's and will do anything for dollars to subsidize her passions for drugs and disco. He lives briefly with a hard-boiled trolley car driver and part-time prostitute named Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko) whose husband is in prison.

From the movie's opening scene, in which Danila lands in trouble after interrupting the filming of a music video and tussling with a security guard, "Brother" suggests that St. Petersburg is a Darwinian battleground where everything is up for grabs.

The center of warfare is a sprawling outdoor market where rival gangs are struggling for the power to extort protection money from the hundreds of intimidated vendors. Ethnic and regional rivalries abound. Danila befriends a German who maintains that "what's good for the Russian is bad for the German." Viktor is contemptuously referred to by his rivals as "the Tatar."

Hooking up with Viktor, whom he has idolized since childhood, Danila is assigned to do his dirtiest work, and he brings a strong, primitive sense of right and wrong to his murderous duties. He also quickly becomes addicted to the instant power he commands when he flashes a gun. When a couple of dhugs refuse to pay their fare on a streetcar, he relishes playing the hero by pulling out his weapon and sending them scurrying.

"Brother," which opens Wednesday at the Film Forum, has a thread of cynical humor that connects it to the American gangster movies of the 1930s as well as to more recent films like "Goodfellas" that examine the flashier trappings of macho gangster culture with a satirical eye. Glamour and power in Danila's world are defined by the wad of cash he carries around and from which he casually peels off $100 bills and dispenses as gifts when the spirit moves him.

More than his gun, Danila's most precious possessions are his CD player and his growing collection of Nautilus albums. The shortsightedness of his morality is evidenced in a scene where he puts on a videotape of his beloved Nautilus and is outraged to discover it is an inferior pirated copy.

Bodrov's Danila is queasily sympathetic as a killer whose touching familial loyalty turns out to be sadly misplaced. In the movie's most cynical joke, he emerges as both the most deadly and the most morally consistent character in a world where loyalty counts for little and brute force rules.



'BROTHER'

Written (in Russian, with English subtitles) and directed by Aleksei Balabanov; director of photography, Sergei Astakhov; edited by Marina Lipartija; music by Slava Butusov; production designer, Vladimir Kartashov; produced by Sergei Selianov; released by Kino International. Running time: 96 minutes. This film is not rated.

With: Sergei Bodrov Jr. (Danila), Viktor Suhorukov (the brother), Svetlana Pismichenko (Sveta), Mariya Zhukova (Kat), Yuri Kuznetsov (Guerman) and Slava Butusov (Butusov).