Vera has a teenage daughter, a product of the Soviet practice of marriage at a
very young age. She and Yulia live with their mothers, as does Vera's
boyfriend, Zhan, reflecting the overhang of Communist-era housing shortages and
Moscow's sky-high real-estate prices.
Yulia, a nymphomaniac who is unemployed, is desperately trying to land a
husband since her father, who supported her, has left her mother for a woman
younger than Yulia. Vera finds out that Zhan is married to a woman he says he
wed fraudulently to provide her with the residence permit needed for even
Russian citizens to live in Moscow.
Alla, a high-powered lawyer with a fetish for male strippers and a fear of
commitment, has some of Samantha's traits. But Lada Dance, the pop star turned
actress who plays her, is equally well aware of what differentiates the series
from "Sex and the City" and what unites the two shows.
"It's about our life, about our mentality," she said. "We have our friendship
between women. They have theirs. It's different. The only thing is that it
turns out that men both here and there are bast," she added.
At first Sonia enjoys life as a widow, taking young lovers for pleasure, but
when the money runs out she becomes a call girl to an oligarch who is sick of
his Barbie-doll wife. She has sex with him in a dark, empty apartment, without
seeing his face, and he begins to confide in her.
Harking back to Dostoyevsky's prostitute with a heart of gold and reflecting
the attitude of many Russian women toward their men, Sonia begins to pity her
lonely client. In a modern twist, she also confesses to Vera - who is a
psychotherapist and, like the Carrie Bradshaw character on "Sex and the City,"
provides the voice-over for the show - that she has never enjoyed sex so much
as this anonymous kind for money.
In the episode broadcast Monday, Sonia ends up being driven to drink and, her
face bruised after a drunken fall, is saved by her girlfriends, who listen to
her lamentations. "I'm 35 and I have neither children nor a husband nor a job,"
she cries. "It's all over. All that's left is a lonely old age."
Yulia tries to comfort her, then cries when Sonia points out that she is in the
same boat. Alla hires male strippers to clean up the apartment, then all the
girlfriends get depressed because they realize that if they were young and
desirable, men would clean up for them for nothing.
But the series nonetheless reflects contemporary Russian realities. Women,
especially in Moscow, have become engines of a growing market economy and are
putting off marriage. Yet women over 30 are often regarded as aging, if not
old; even those who have their first child in their late 20s are categorized as
coming late to motherhood. Indeed, the show's name, "Balzac Age," refers to
Honore de Balzac's novel "A Woman of Thirty" and is the polite Russian way of
referring to a woman who is getting on in years.
These mores have long placed men in a privileged position in relationships. So
did the Soviet Union's historical legacy of war, repression and alcoholism,
which has left Russia, where men live to an average age of about 59, with an
acute shortage of males, many of whom are raised and spoiled by single mothers.
"We have completely different relations between men and women," said Maksim
Stishov, the scriptwriter and a producer of "Balzac Age." "We have fewer men,
many fewer men than women. This affects relations of women with each other and
with men."
Dmitry Fiks, the director and co-producer, is even more blunt. "We have
infantile men," he said. But he added the goal of the series was not to roast
them but to poke fun at their weaknesses. "We love them and make them funny,"
he said. "They are very gentle and touching, but all slight imbeciles."
The New York Times
