Peeter Rebane (2021)
In 1977, on a military base in Soviet-occupied Estonia, a cadet falls in love with a dashing fighter pilot. At the start of Firebird, Sergey (Tom Prior) is in a tentative romance with Luisa (Diana Podharskaya), secretary to the base commander, Kuznetsov (Nicholas Woodeson), and counting the days to the end of his national service. The arrival on the scene of Lieutenant Roman Medveyev (Oleg Zagorodnii) changes all that. He and Sergey are initially drawn to together by a shared interest in photography and theatre. Sergey has never been to the ballet; Roman has an exeat to see The Firebird. He arranges for Sergey to drive him there and watch the show. The intensely vivid colours on the stage contrast gorgeously with the thoroughgoing greyness of the Cold War-era military base. On the way back from the theatre, the physical relationship between Sergey and Roman begins. Homosexuality in the Soviet Union armed forces was illegal. Roman, all set for a doubly high-flying military career, is nervous of being found out, especially once an anonymous letter comes into the possession of hostile, inquisitive Major Zverev (Margus Prangel).
Sergey had intended, after military service, to return home to work on his widowed mother’s small farm. Instead, with Roman’s encouragement, he applies successfully for a place at a prestigious Moscow drama school. By 1979, he’s flourishing there but is shocked by Luisa’s news when she comes to visit: she and Roman are to be married and she’s pregnant with his child. The second half of the film takes place in the early 1980s. Sergey is about to graduate; Roman, on a temporary posting to Moscow, takes an apartment there, leaving his wife and their young son back in Estonia. The affair between Sergey and Roman resumes. When Luisa arrives to celebrate New Year with her husband they and Sergey mark the occasion together, at what proves to be a last supper. Sensitive to his lover’s divided feelings, Sergey departs next morning, leaving a note that tells Roman their relationship is over. Luisa reads the note before her husband has chance to do so. She returns to Estonia and Roman joins the Soviet invasion forces in Afghanistan, where he’s killed in action. In the film’s closing sequence, Sergey is back in a theatre (and conspicuous in a distracting way: he wears a DJ and black tie – unlike any of the other men glimpsed in the audience). With tears in his eyes, he’s watching the same Stravinsky ballet that marked the start of his and Roman’s romance.
Firebird, receiving its world premiere at this year’s (online) BFI Flare festival, is the first dramatic feature by Peeter Rebane, who has previously directed pop videos and TV shows, and the documentary Tashi Delek! (2015). He and Tom Prior also produced (with Brigita Rozenbrika) and wrote the screenplay, based on The Story of Roman, a memoir by the Russian actor Sergey Fetisov (who died in 2017). Rebane is Estonian, as is much of the cast, though Oleg Zagorodnii is Ukrainian and Diana Podharskaya is Russian. Yet the dialogue is in English – I guess because the lead actor is British and/or Firebird means to make its mark in the Anglophone market. The non-native speakers of English aren’t all equally comfortable with their lines but this isn’t a big issue. Prior and Nicholas Woodeson (an experienced screen East European – Borgen, The Death of Stalin) speak lightly accented English, which helps unify the sound of the film’s voices.
This absorbing film has real merits but it must be said that it features more plot clichés than surprises. Although the visual leitmotifs are well worked out (and well photographed, by Mait Mäekivi), the ideas underlying them are very familiar. The pelagic imagery is the standout example. In a prologue, fragments of which replay in Sergey’s mind at subsequent points, two pre-adolescent boys swim underwater. In the opening scene proper, Sergey, Luisa and their friend Volodja (Jake Henderson), another cadet, have made an unauthorised excursion from the air base to go swimming – the emphasis, for Sergey anyway, seems to be on holding his breath underwater for as long as possible. Sergey and Roman swim and make love in the sea on the night of The Firebird: the sequence climaxes (the only word for it) almost comically, with a shot of two fighter jets soaring overhead. On a later, otherwise idyllic seaside trip together, Sergey reveals to Roman that his best friend in childhood drowned at the age of thirteen, in light of the boy’s father’s reaction to his son’s incipient gayness. By now, Peeter Rebane’s illustrations of forbidden sexual feelings putting you in deep water are getting a bit much.
For as long as the action is focused on the military base, the main characters’ predicament is plain. Extravagantly homophobic insults directed at Sergey and his fellow cadets, in the disciplinary rants of their psycho supervisor (Kaspar Velberg), convey the taken-as-read impossibility of actual same-sex activities in this environment. The supervisor abuses his charges as ‘fags’ etc not because he thinks they are but because these are the most insulting terms he can think to use. Once the narrative moves on to Moscow, however, it loses clarity – especially regarding Sergey’s relationships at the drama school. He’s a leading light of his year, attracts students of both sexes but is disengaged from the other students. Rebane may mean to suggest that, because of his devotion to Roman, Sergey lives like a monk while they’re apart but it’s hard to accept that interested parties in this community would know to leave Sergey alone. Masha (Ester Kuntu), who fancies him, also recognises that he’s committed to his studies (she says he always has his nose in a book). Yet Ester Kuntu’s warmth and sparky curiosity in the role make it hard to believe that Masha wouldn’t be determined to find out more about Sergey.
Roman and Luisa’s wedding breakfast is held at the air base. All Roman’s colleagues, even the piggish Zverev, are in attendance; the bride and groom’s families are noticeably absent; the only civilian present is Sergey, despite his unhappy feelings about the marriage. He appears to have accepted an invitation in order to seduce Roman when they briefly leave the dining room and that Zverev can then again try and fail to catch them in flagrante delicto. The best moment of this mostly unconvincing episode comes in Colonel Kuznetsov’s remark that he understands how Sergey must feel seeing Roman and Luisa together. ‘I knew what was going on under my nose’, says the colonel and Sergey freezes. ‘Yes,’ Kuznetsov continues, ‘if he hadn’t come along, she would have married you’.
Once Roman is in Moscow and Sergey moves in with him, the scenes between them are fine. A party in the apartment, however, where the guests are other military officers and drama school students, made no sense to me: aren’t Sergey and Roman both intent on keeping their private lives just that? There are good bits here. The cultural confusion of Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ playing at a party in Moscow is funny. Volodja opens a door to find Sergey and Roman inside, in each other’s arms: after the extended suspense of sequences where the pair avoids detection by Zverev, the suddenness of this is effective. But Volodja makes the discovery only so that he can then reveal to Sergey that he wrote the poison pen letter about Roman’s sexual preferences which triggered Zverev’s mission to discredit him. It’s also puzzling that the always apprehensive Roman isn’t more anxious about the consequences of Volodja’s discovery – and, indeed, that there don’t seem to be any consequences.
Tom Prior is thirty but looks younger, passing easily for a fresh-faced cadet and someone of normal student age. Prior gives a decent performance but, in such a big role, doesn’t show enough range to avoid becoming repetitive. The two other faces of the film’s love triangle are more compelling. Diana Podharskaya is emotionally fluid; she impresses despite an underwritten part. Oleg Zagorodnii, with his chiselled features and penetrating eyes, cuts an imposing figure. He makes you think Firebird would have been better as (and as per Sergey Fetisov’s title) the story of Roman, who is subject to stronger pressures than Sergey to conform and conceal, and always ambivalent. One of the dramatic highlights is the immediate aftermath to a dangerous flying mission that Roman is lucky, and knows he’s lucky, to survive. Sergey seeks him out to check he’s OK, Roman, in that moment, is ready to throw emotional caution aside. This close shave, in retrospect, foreshadows of Roman’s death in action, which has another aspect too. His departure for Afghanistan, soon after Luisa’s discovery of his affair with Sergey, has the quality of a suicide mission: Roman feels his sexuality leaves him nowhere to go.
After learning of his death, Sergey pays a call on Luisa and her child – an affecting scene thanks to the trio’s mess of unhappy feelings. The fatherless son (uncredited on IMDb) is particularly expressive, though he looks considerably older than the three-year-old I thought he was meant to be. But neither this scene nor Sergey’s return visit to The Firebird is quite the film’s last word. Concluding text notes that Estonia, on regaining its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, espoused more liberal approaches to same-sex relationships; but that recent years have seen a sharp regression in Russian attitudes to gay men in the military. Peeter Rebane plays his final card unusually late. Right at the end of the closing credits, the unlovely Major Zverev returns to view. His is the face on the screen immediately before it goes dark.
18 March 2021
