MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Уважаемые читатели!  I’m really happy to say that my profile of director Timur Bekmambetov came out in the January issue of Snob (a magazine targeted at moderately but not excessively rich Russian people), in a beautiful Russian translation, with beautiful photography.  Unfortunately it isn’t available online, and I don’t even have a hard copy.  But there is a preview on their website—here is a screen shot, or part of one anyway:

You can’t tell from that picture but he was actually a really nice guy, and not accompanied by a floating man-sized pistol (or at least not always accompanied by a floating man-sized pistol). 

For English-reading readers, I’m putting up the first 1000 words.  For Russian-reading readers, that picture was worth 1000 words!  Спасибо, что пришли!

The Los Angeles offices of Timur Bekmambetov, Russia’s highest-grossing film director, are located in a modern, single-story house in the hills of Studio City. On visiting them this winter, I was immediately impressed by their normalcy. Apparently, I had expected Team Bekmambetov to work out of a power plant or a meat-locker. As I walked up the driveway, past a modest black Mercedes hatchback—he doesn’t drive a red sportscar!—I found myself remembering a review of Wanted in the New Yorker:

What is it like to be Timur Bekmambetov?… How, for example, does he make a cup of coffee? My best guess, based on the evidence of [Wanted], is that he tosses a handful of beans toward the ceiling, shoots them individually into a fine powder, leaves it hanging in the air, runs downstairs, breaks open a fire hydrant with his head, carefully directs the jet of water through the window of his apartment, sets fire to the building, then stands patiently with his mug amid the blazing ruins…

Well, that reviewer was wrong: I saw Bekmambetov’s French press coffee maker with my own eyes. And according to his assistant, he only drinks decaf. The coffee maker looked spotless and brand-new, like all the other appurtenances—with the possible exception of what I took to be some kind of miniature Central Asian dwellings made of brightly colored cloth, sitting on the hearth of a glassy fireplace in the “media room,” which turned out, however, to be some kind of triangular Thai floor pillows, specially ordered by Bekmambetov’s assistant (who offered to hook me up with her distributor): Bekmambetov sits on them when he watches movies.

The house was partitioned into various rooms and workspaces, and around every corner there seemed to be either a giant flat-screen monitor, or a giant panoramic plate-glass window, or a giant glass door leading to some kind of a cactus garden. In a Bekmambetov movie, it would make a great motorcycle course. I was received at the door by Bekmambetov’s two very pleasant assistants: Sasha, a very young man with a slight build and a large Afro, who spoke both English and Russian without a perceptible accent; and Kathy, an American woman with a brisk and kindly demeanor, wearing a Bluetooth headset, followed everywhere by a gray-spotted, yellow-eyed Australian shepherd called Belle.

Bekmambetov was still in a video conference, so I took a seat on an ergonomic-looking bar stool and addressed myself to the question of what the master of Russian vampires keeps on his breakfast counter. I noted: (1) a book called Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die, which lists thousands of causes of death in alphabetical order (X-rays, yawning, zoofatalism); (2) a three-day-old issue of the Los Angeles Times, open to an article about Medvedev’s visit to Washington; and (3) a closed cardboard box with a stamp from the Serpukhovsky Meat-Processing Complex.

Having browsed through both the book and the newspaper, I regretfully decided that it would be bad manners to open the box. Happily, I didn’t have to remain curious for long: Bekmambetov later revealed its contents unbidden. “Have you seen this? It’s a Russian soldiers’ ration!” Out of the box came packets of “Army” crackers, dehydrated tea with sugar, multivitamin powder, and canned “Фарш любительский” (“Mincemeat for Mincemeat Fans”? “Connoisseur’s Mincemeat”?). Kathy picked up a container labeled “Рисовая каша [cream of rice] with Pork.”

“It’s a kind of porridge,” the filmmaker explained.

“Do you add liquid to it, or is it already wet?” she asked.

“Eh, well… I don’t know,” said Bekmambetov.

“It has pork in it,” I contributed.

“Ah—so it’s a lunch porridge,” Kathy concluded.

The grayish cans and packets looked out-of-place in the gleaming Los Angeles kitchen—but this kind of “montage” is somehow typical of Bekmambetov. On his blog, for example, the filmmaker links his own military service experiences— he worked as a mortar-man (миномётчиком) in an artillery division in Turkmenistan in 1987–88—to the famous curving bullets in Wanted: “Mines, as everyone knows, travel in an arc. So there was nothing fantastic to me about the mythology of Wanted. The curvature of flying objects (bullets) was my wartime profession.” In this convergence of the real arc of a Soviet artillery shell, and the imaginary arc of bullets handcrafted by super-assasin monks in Eastern Moravia, one seems to glimpse all the addictive tensions of Bekmambetov’s films: between the realistic and the romantic, between the everyday and the epic, between the Red Army and a millennial “brotherhood” where fantasy bullets careen around Angelina Jolie’s body.

So how did he get from there to here? Bekmambetov’s critics joke that the Russian title of Wanted, Особо опасен (Extremely Dangerous), is inaccurate, because in fact his most recent film is all about what Bekmambetov wanted: he wanted to go to Hollywood, he wanted to film Angelina Jolie, and so on. In person, though, Bekmambetov does not strike one as a monster of ambition. He resembles a small, solid bear of thoughtful character. He has a broad bear-like neck and a round face, with a close-cut beard, slightly almond-shaped eyes, and peaked eyebrows. When I met him, he was wearing jeans and a shirt made of some synthetic material with a 1970s-style print. Although the shirt had some hipster potential, Bekmambetov would have fit in better with the truck drivers and computer hackers of the Night Watch, than with the bling-covered glitterati of the Day Watch. (Bekmambetov’s father, like the chief of the Night Watch, held a high position at the municipal energy plant.) Only an occasional rumbling laugh—a “dark” laugh—seems more in keeping with the outrageous savagery of his film aesthetic. (When I asked Bekmambetov which side he would choose, between Light and Dark, his reply was at once sage-sounding and evasive: “While we are alive, we decide this question anew every day. The right to choose is what makes us human.”

To subscribe to Snob from anywhere in the world though, just go to their site and click where it says “Где взять.” (Is there any way to link to a particular page on a multi-page Flash site?  If there is, I don’t know it.  I should ask the Webmaster.)

Individual soldiers’ ration
Serpukhovsky Meat-Processing Complex

Tags: beards, clothes, money, politics, publications, Russia, translation

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.