National Identity, Cultural Authority, and the Post-Soviet Blockbuster: Nikita Mikhalkov and Aleksei Balabanov

Abstract

In this article, Susan Larsen argues that the plot lines, aesthetic choices and marketing strategies of the four most commercially successful Russian films of the last decade—Nikita Mikhalkov’sBurnt by the SunandBarber of Siberiaand Aleksei Balabanov’sBrotherandBrother-2—are shaped by anxieties about Russian national identity and cultural authority that these films articulate in gendered terms as threats to paternal bonds and fraternal communities. Aiming both to emulate and to displace the Hollywood films that dominate the Russian film market, Mikhalkov and Balabanov exploit the conventions of the historical melodrama and the crime thriller to construct an explicitly Russian and emphatically masculine heroism in stories of charismatic, vanished fathers and dangerous, but irresistible brothers who defy the moral decay, crass materialism, economic imperialism and cultural solipsism that all four films associate with the west and, in particular, the United States.