By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Melancholy maybe: the Russian mood
A brief brood on the notion of why Russians like their melancholy, from Vladimir Kozlov in Moscow Times: “It has long been debated whether tragic plots indeed better coincide with the Russian mentality and cultural background, or whether that was just a stereotype successfully spread by greedy producers and distributors of the silent-film era, eager to cash in on anything. Some cultural theorists have explained the prevalence of tragic endings in early Russian films by stating that the entire Russian artistic tradition of the 20th century — including cinema — derived from ancient and, therefore, “sublime” art forms, as opposed to Hollywood-style mass-culture products…The practice of changing the finales of Hollywood films in order to bring them in line with the assumed tastes of Russian audiences started before the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, domestic producers claimed that Russian audiences, brought up with 19th-century theatrical melodramas — which inevitably ended sadly — would not like films with happy ends, instead preferring death, blood and suicide… 
With the loosening of censorship as a result of glasnost in the late 1980s, topics that used to be taboo under the previous system began to be actively explored by filmmakers. A wave of chernukha, or dark naturalism, inundated Russian cinema and swept away almost everything else. There was no longer a place for happy endings. The teenage heroine of Vasily Pichul’s Little Vera attempts suicide; in Pyotr Todorovsky’s Intergirl, a reformed prostitute dies in a car crash; and in Sergei Solovyov’s Assa, the protagonist Bananan is killed by a mafia boss who, in turn, gets shot by his mistress…. Since then, despite drastic political and cultural changes in the country, Russian filmmakers’ inclination for sad endings seems to have remained unchanged. The last major international success story in Russian film, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s 2003 The Return, which won a Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival, has a tragic denouement in which an unnecessarily strict father dies in an attempt to save his younger son.”
