Limonov: The Ballad
A biopic of a more interesting version of Navalny, more artiste than power-hungry Lenin wannabe. Some batshit insane sequences, suck it Eisenstein, what do you know about montage?
Eddie is some random Russian guy, what I would call “middle class”, his father is some Tcheka apparatchik. He fills his steel quota by day, and writes poetry and partakes in the hedonistic pleasures of the flesh by night. A Russian gangsta rapper, basically.
His work is being noticed, something he pumps up to insane levels, but this seems a kind of irony that continues throughout the whole thing. He is never serious, but doesn’t joke either. As they say, “nothing is permitted but everything is important”.
Another constant is that Eddie gets bored and does something else entirely. In this case, graduating from reading poetry to some bourgeois dudes in dinky apartments with flushing toilets in the background, in some podunk town, to reading poetry to bourgeois dudes in a podunk dacha outside Moscow.
It’s a joke really, he was in Kharkiv, in Eastern Ukraine (no matter what Putin says), but he wants something more, something different. He writes poetry for the “official” publishers, but it’s too out there for them.
He also manages to convince some hot rich babe his boyfriend is a bore, by nearly killing himself outside his apartment when she brushes him off but takes her new jeans, manually measured previously. This is The Notebook on steroids (and champagne).
He is not a dues-paying member of the writers union, so his poetry is considered samizdat, and he faces jail. His chutzpah knows no bounds, he literally admits to being a freeloader in the Soviet Union and requests he be exiled so he can freeload the capitalist pigs, like Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky before him. But he’s not famous, not yet.
Fame it is! He writes things for the western market, takes some crazy photos with his girlfriend, and finally his request for exile is accepted, he gets to New York. The first look at 70’s Times Square-ish is a fantastic oner that comes out of a porn theatre into chaotic street life, with prostitutes talking to a Taxi Driver, all kinds of free love, jazz, and some sandwich men advertising “men’s lib, get the woman to work so they can leave us be” or something.
The exile doesn’t come with a pension, so he extends the beggar bowl to Uncle Sam, which provides meagre Social Security. How ironic, having all these riches and keeping them locked away so no one can partake in them.
With lack of money, comes lack of sex from the girlfriend, it’s all fun and games when she was slumming it in Moscow, but this is America. When a photographer promises a shoot with Grace Jones in exchange for handfuls of those great tits, and “fucking all the holes”, she takes it.
Eddie says he would take it in stride, that he loves her above all, but it’s all fake, he nearly strangles her and she leaves. He gets so lonely, he meets some drunk guy in a filthy back alley, a burly leather-jacket wearing Black Panther, and asks for some old fashioned buggery, for a change. His inner twink is satisfied.
He’s no homo, he refuses the advances of his literary pal, fakes his own death, and goes to work being a butler to a millionaire. Here, he meets a Russian guy that likes his work, and he eventually gets to Paris.
In the city of lights he lives the same life as New York, but they don’t have the budget to replace all the filthy street sets with Haussmanian boulangeries. We get a radio debate where he takes the contrarian view on everything, trolling the intelligentsia, then throws [Vichy Water](Casablanca) in the woman’s face and breaks the bottle on the guy’s head. Fuck everything.
Since he published more books than that sad fuck Solzhenitsyn, that sexless, bloodless dried husk, he gets back home, just in time for Perestroika.
Eddie doesn’t like what he sees. He visits the 5 star Hotel Ukraine, and it’s filthy! He even visits his father, said KGB collaborator, which brags about having a full pantry, and complains that Gorbachov is taking Russia down the drain. Do they mean the Pizza Hut dude, with the birth mark?
Anyway, he’s back in Russia to promote his new book, which apparently goes well, I guess.
Fast forward a few years later and he is in his final form, as leader of a weird syncretic Nazbol group of goons (co-founded with Aleksandr Dugin, which he calls more a gym club, a YMCA with red banners and grenade sigils.
He requests an audience with the powers thar be to bring the political party into legality, but he is brushed off. The commissar mentions Putin has a job for him, if he just stops with this political nonsense and just writes books.
Since Eddie is disinclined to acquiesce to Putin, he and his muchachos are taken to a Siberian colony, where he remains for a long time, with his friends (not Kermit).
It seems the cold air did reeducate him, since he is similar to the Communist Party now, a member of the controlled opposition.
A final blurb mentions his faction was ecstatic at the dawn of a new Patriotic War to liberate his old Kharkiv homeland from Nazis in 2014, alongside Crimea, and he died in 2020, without knowing about the biggest military flop of Russia’s history, that large convoy from Belarus that was stopped in its tracks.
I like how he described himself as the Russian Johnny Rotten, that is so fitting, as he’s also another rich dude that turned Trumpist late in life.
He was also described as “if someone had given Michel Houellebecq a machine gun”.
About the butler story, the Aston Martin US distributor, on which the real Limonov attended, said the book “was as if Hunter Thompson had written ‘The Nanny Diaries’”.
I like that this film can clearly be located in time after the Donbas invasion, since they use Kharkov in the film itself, but Kharkiv in the final crawl. The local (professional) subtitles translated it as “Krakow”, what the hell were they thinking!
One part that was left out was him with his pal Radovan Karadžić shooting civillians for sport. There’s apparently video of this!
marching in tight formation, extending their arms to display a cross between a Roman salute and the clenched fist of the Red Front. Their banner: essentially a hammer and sickle superimposed on a Nazi flag. Images of Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, and sometimes Sid Vicious
He lived to be a RT talking head mocking Trump and Zelensky!
You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.