Jake Hamnn

4/26/04

Russian Film

Window to Paris

Yuri Mamin’s Window to Paris is a hilarious romp that plays on commonly held stereotypes of Russian and French peoples. It is a fish-out-of-water type comedy wherein a loud family of Russians find that a wardrobe in their St. Petersburg apartment leads to Paris, France. As one might well imagine, wackiness then ensues. Mamin is an equal opportunity satirist and he mocks the flaws in both of these cultures, exposing their weaknesses. The French are portrayed as materialistic, shallow and decadent. This is most forcefully shown in the sequence where Nikolai is about to perform Mozart without pants. The viewer and Nikolai find out what that means at the same time and we both recoil at the sight of the withered old men’s backsides and legs. Mamin cuts to shots of naked women serving drinks which, when combined with the ornate gold and wood panels in the room, give the sense that one has tumbled into some kind of time warp to the era of the Sun King. Another scene that contains a dig at French pomposity is when the desiccated old woman complains about how her cat was not properly stuffed. The stuffed cat looks completely fake and ridiculous and makes her look like a shrill uptight hag.

Although the French do get their share of ridicule in this film, in the end it is Russians and Russia that come away looking the worst. Although the French are admittedly portrayed as materialistic in the film, the Russians are shown as would-be materialists who are too naïve to navigate the waters of capitalism. At the school Nikolai teaches at, the kids are taught marketing and management by women who look like bizzaro versions of Ivana Trump. In a more obvious touch, the walls of the principal’s office are covered in framed currency. And despite Gorokhov’s condemnation of French wastefulness and greed, he buys and steals as much as he can to take back to Russia. He and his family’s obnoxious red Paris clothes reveal their crassness and acquisitiveness. They try to sell their wares as they see street vendors and musicians do, but they cannot compete and instead scare people off with their crudeness.

In addition to the rather dark portrayal of Russian people, Russia itself isn’t spared either. At several times during the movie, characters profess their love or nostalgia for Russia. The scene where Gorokhov’s daughter thinks she is stuck in Paris and screams for "Mother Russia" comes immediately to mind. But when the Parisian, Vera gets stuck in Russia, it is hard to see what they could miss about it. Mamin follows Vera through the streets of St. Petersburg, showing only the dark, filthy and scary parts of the city. Garbage drops from the sky. The walls and the ground are covered in grime. A maniac destroys a phone booth seemingly for no reason. The audience is just as lost and confused as Vera is by the action in the city because Mamin doesn’t allow us to have any more knowledge than she does. Not one positive thing happens to her while she is in Russia. And just when we think that an old woman is showing Vera an example of Russian hospitality, she robs Vera of her expensive nightgown and forces her back into the street.

Although Window to Paris satirizes both Western and Russian cultures, it is Russia that is the but of most jokes. Russia is portrayed as a backwards country full of yokels and hypocrites. Tellingly, immediately after Nikolai makes his big speech pledging his allegiance to Russia and returned home, he begins looking for another way back, striking at the giant wall in hopes of another window to the west. The west may be stupid, the film seems to be saying, but thank god it’s not Russia.