Mourning the lost days of perestroika in Balabanov’sBrother

Abstract

Since its release in 1997, Aleksei Balabanov’s film Brother (Brat, 1997) has been the source of numerous analyses examining its promotion of post-Soviet Russian values and xenophobia. This article will offer an alternative, but complementary, discussion of Brother’s contribution to the construction of a stable post-Soviet Russian identity by presenting the film as an example of Balabanov’s measured nostalgia for the lost freedoms of perestroika. In particular, this article demonstrates how Balabanov selectively evokes and inverts prominent elements of chernukha films and films about youth from the 1980s. This allows the director to position the protagonist, Danila, as an inheritor of perestroika’s ills, but also as a figure who supersedes the negative aspects of Russia’s recent past. However, the film also extensively references Balabanov’s own experiences as a member of the underground rock scene in Sverdlovsk during perestroika, embodying the director’s nostalgia for this era. The film serves as an elegy to the rock scene of the 1980s, and an attempt to illustrate that some elements of the Soviet past are worth preserving.

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