I wrote this whole blog post before I realized that I don’t write anywhere that wants hacky blog posts about things no one has ever heard of. So, enjoy!
“Every hipster is a potential criminal” So intones the opening of the trailer (above) for Russian musical Hipsters,the main contribution of which may be that I know now that the Russian word for “hipsters” is “stilyagi,” which makes me feel like I now, finally, get the joke of that one Puro Instinct song
Anyway, the movie is set in the 1950s, so, sadly, it’s not a Russian mumblecore musical full of skinny-jeaned people falling in and out of love at a Lana Del Ray show, which is honestly what I was hoping for when I clicked on the link. Anyway, that movie already sort of exists (check it out on Netflix Instant!) Instead, it’s about Cold-War-era Russian kids listening to “hot jazz” while sporting extremely cartoonish clothes and hairstyles. The whole thing kind of feels like Jim Carey starring in Swing Kids.
You’d think that the fact that it’s set in the 1950s in Soviet Russia would make the whole thing kind of ominous and scary, but the petty rebellions still seem to revolve around who you get to kiss or whatever. I just checked Wikipedia, and I guess the movie is set in 1955, which was actually in sort of a window of openness for the USSR after the death of Stalin when the governing team of Premiere Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin and soon-to-be Premiere Nikita Khrushchev were known in the press as “the B and K show.” Any era where anyone is governed by a “so-and-so show” isn’t all bad, I guess.
What was I talking about? The movie is the winner of four Nikas (the Russian Oscars, basically), including Best Film and Best Costumes, and it opens February 24 at City Cinema Village East.
