There is a long history of such stories in cinema, and critics have identified
Federico Fellini's 1957 "Nights of Cabiria" as a loose prototype. In the Soviet
Union, a groundbreaking perestroika-era treatment came in 1989 with Pyotr
Todorovsky's "Interdevochka," although the emphasis there was more on
then-current issues such as contact between Soviet citizens and foreigners,
rather than on the sheer gritty business of prostitution itself. (For the
record, "Interdevochka" star Yelena Yakovleva plays a role in Moroz's longer
television adaptation of "The Spot," filmed in parallel with the big-screen
version).
Compared to Moroz's treatment, Todorovsky's film seems like a return to
paradise, one in which basic norms of human relations are still observed. "The
Spot" has some astonishingly cruel scenes that convincingly show how a decade
of start-up capitalism has damaged the psyches of the newly enriched, male part
of the Russian population who form the prostitutes' clients. In fact, the men
seem even worse off, psychologically speaking, than the film's three female
leads, who have been driven by circumstances from bleak provincial lives into
the dog-eat-dog (literally, in the opening scene) streets of Moscow.
For Moroz, "dog-eat-dog" seems to have become the national ideology, rather
than any more idealistic version propagated from on high. Those who call his
approach chernukha, or doom and gloom, might care to look out their windows.
Nor is there much value in debating whether the film's action is taking place
today or a decade ago, when the kind of gangster killing depicted here was
arguably more prevalent. Two scenes in particular -- one involving a
mud-and-rain rape, the other an hours-long confinement in a swimming pool --
only hint at the disturbing depths of male sadism and perversion.
The film's three female leads -- Nina, Anya and Kira (Darya Moroz, Anna Ukolova
and Viktoria Isakova, respectively) -- have escaped different provincial
destinies, recalled in a series of flashbacks. Moroz's Nina comes from a
pathological family environment that, most notably, drives her to shave herself
bald after she has shit tipped over her head by her mother; her first
experience on the game in Moscow ends no less brutally when she gets thrown out
of a police car.
Anya has fled from an abusive stepfather and the unwanted attentions of a
half-brother, while Kira has escaped a hostile military father who's opposed to
her very respectable romance with a budding soldier, who goes off to die in
Chechnya. When the dead soldier's Moscow relatives refuse to have anything to
do with her, she's taken in by an agonizingly cruel man-and-woman pair of pimps
who work her out of a train carriage.
The three wind up at the film's main tochka, whose pimp, although uninviting
enough, seems to play by some sort of rules. And there's solidarity among the
prostitutes themselves, who look after one another -- at least until the film's
chilling final episodes. The trio find a basic enough home in a caravan
community run by Vietnamese gastarbeiters whose sense of human values strikes
just about the only positive note in "The Spot."
Working on digital video, cinematographer Nikolai Ivasiv creates a rough visual
picture, the only kind that could possibly match the film's story. The music,
too, is appropriately laconic.
Russian audiences aren't exactly flocking to Moroz's work, as critics debate
whether it would have attracted real national attention had it been made during
perestroika. It probably would have. Perhaps viewers are inured to surrounding
reality -- just as the prostitutes themselves are in the film's final (and
cruelest) scene, in which the three part company. Two, "borrowing" money from
the third, glam themselves up and move to open their own tochka; the third,
distraught at the loss of hope, leaps to her death. At least we assume she
does. It's to the director's credit that he doesn't depict it: Moroz, after
all, has shown everything that came before with more than brutal honesty.
The Moscow Times
