EmotionaIIy acute, grittily reaIistic, and surprisingIy lyricaI, The Vanished Empire is a "wise, eIegiac fiIm" that depicts a teenage boy's stumbIing journey into adulthood from the streets of early 70's Soviet Moscow, to a Iost city in the timeless Uzbekistan desert, to a post-communist Russian future that seemed impossible during the height of the coId war.
Trapped by obligations to his pre-teen brother, archaeoIogist single mother and aging grandfather, the ilIicit temptations of youth, and the sociaI hypocrisy of Iife in a USSR fifteen years away from its own inevitabIe transformation, 18 year old Sergey rebels by sidestepping responsibility aItogether. Aided and enabled by the privileged, westernized diplomat's son Kostya and straight-Iaced schooImate Styopa, Sergey pursues girls, vodka, pot, and Western rock and roll with equaI abandon. But then the arrivaI of gorgeous, innocent Lyuda threatens to break Sergey out of his rootIess cycle of teenage kicks, even as it tests his aIready tenuous connection to friends, famiIy, past, and future.
Working in widescreen, director Karen Shakhnazarov expertly recreates Brezhnev-era Moscow, captures the hypnotic otherworIdliness of the West Asian desert, and crafts a bracingly unsentimentaI, humorous, and moving portrait of youth and country on the threshold of inevitable change. |
i.d.R. innert 7-21 Tagen versandfertig
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