Strange Bedfellows: Two Russians in the Free World
A video opera which is part soap opera, part analytical essay on the relation of art to capitalism, part meta-fiction on the nature of free will, with shadings of baroque allegorical opera and social comedy, Two Russians in the Free World is an extraordinary video series in 13 episodes, created by Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager.
Two Russians tells the story of two middle-aged expatriate Russians in New York. Mani, vividly portrayed by Joshua Mack, is a billionaire Russian businessman who is “pursued by art dealers” who have pegged him as a likely collector. His unlikely paramour is Sasha (Sasha Jampolsky), a penniless former performance artist and exile from the Soviet Union. Jampolsky is a charismatic nonconformist, and his character is based on his actual life story. Some of the footage in the film is from an interview of him recalling his life in Russia. Some of Mani’s dialog is likewise taken from the remarks of an actual Russian billionaire. The film is built on a unique hybrid of documentary, fiction, and opera. The tag line description of their relationship is “An artist who no longer makes art, and a billionaire who doesn’t collect art.” The story is wittily framed as a sort of Odd Couple soap opera.
The first several episodes consist entirely of dialog between the two men. Sasha reminisces about the subversive performances he gave as a young artist in the Soviet Union, until the KGB suggested that he leave the country. As Sasha describes his youthful work, it sounds like a series of dadaist pranks, designed to shock Soviet citizens out of their torpor and, simply by existing outside of rational discourse, slip out of the prevailing ideology. Mani philosophizes wistfully about his ambivalence towards buying Picassos as an investment. “I live mostly in my plane,” he says, and invites Sasha to comment, but can two such opposite world-views, such opposite histories, have anything to say to one another?
All of the dialog is sung, with the actors’ spoken words blended with a singer’s voice. Moskowitz and Trager have extensively altered the timing of the video footage so that the rhythm of the actors’ speech conforms to the rhythm of the melody. The music, with simple arrangements of electric guitar, organ and sampled instruments, is a form of folk recitative, pleasantly droning tunes, set to one or two chords. Their words retain the peculiar grammar of Russians trying to speak English, and their accented, spoken speech is layered over the anodyne, sweetly American-accented singer. The video artifacts of the re-timing are plainly visible. The effect is that their Russian-ness is literally being awkwardly superimposed over a homegrown American musical style, and this awkwardness becomes a powerful embodiment of the disjunctive experience of immigration, in which life is lived through continual translation.
The plot is designed to explore certain themes: the commodification of art and the co-optation of dissident artists, the trans-national characteristics of the ruling elite, and the way that money affects the experience of the immigrant. By asking whether or not a billionaire and a poor dissident artist can find love, they are asking a big question: can there be any fruitful, positive relationship between the artist and society, in a late capitalist world of unprecedented financial inequality?
Moskowitz and Trager have also written themselves into the script, as two video artists sitting at the editing console, with god-like control over the story. Trager comments: “This piece offers itself as allegory, in several ways, while at the same time, disrupting the possibilities of allegorizing.” By speaking in this rather high-flown, artspeak terminology, they use the characters of “the filmmakers” to represent a meta level on which the piece might be framed and packaged for galleries and presenters, showing the ubiquitous entanglement of art-as-product in a capitalist world. (Their actual press release uses a similar tone, but so do nearly all artist press releases.) The comments of “the filmmakers,” like all the dialog in the video, are set to music, placing their “outside the story” personas firmly within the fictional context.
The two editors, watching the footage, ask “can events be determined by whim, by gesture, by enchantment?” Sasha and Mani live in such an overdetermined reality, with their histories and economic status determining so many of their possibilities. The old philosophical question of free will, in the context of art, becomes the crucial question of whether one can will one’s way out of a social framework, to escape “the free world” of Western capitalism in order to experience actual freedom. The idea that the characters “Erik” and “Amanda” exert external control over Sasha and Mani’s fates is just one of several metaphors for this.
The fact that the men are gay, and by Sasha’s description, met in the context of some extremely kinky sex, simply highlights their alienation, intensifies their outsider status. Mani rather playfully describes Sasha, when they first met, as “making a performance” out of seducing him for money. In other words, he makes the move which a poor artist is expected to make with a billionaire, but, as is Sasha’s bent, he distances himself from the humiliating and art-crushing reality of his position as a beggar: he frames the whole experience as a performance, a satire. According to Mani, they were both completely surprised to discover the genuine affection they developed for one another, since it seemed to come from outside the standard “script” for how artists approach potential patrons.
In a humorously self-deprecating meta-critique, “Erik” and “Amanda” have a little spat, in which they both whine about how “humiliating” it is to expose themselves through art. A chorus of muses, three blasé art-hipsters, enters the editing suite, replacing the bickering couple, and succinctly criticizes their self-criticism: “I thought they’d never leave.” “Doesn’t anyone know how to make art any more?” They’re like updated versions of the angels and cherubs debating social issues in one of Rameau’s allegorical operas.
One might expect a film about artists discussing art, while editing a film about an artist discussing art, to be circular and lacking in invention, but Two Russians is filled with inspiration, with quirky and unexpected turns. Moskowitz and Trager turn their own neurotic tendency to obsessively pick themselves apart to comic advantage, wittily writing their self-consciousness into the opera.
In one fascinating incident, set at a boarding gate at an airport, the couple runs into a pretentious art writer friend. In the nasty exchange which follows, their conversation bizarrely devolves into a slow motion list of slang terms for “money,” some of which are surely made up: “dockets,” “swatch,” “baloonies.” This tendency of the work, to open up parts of conversations and zoom into the terminology, as if placing it under a microscope, is an effort to discover the cultural notions which are hiding in the language. It’s one of Moskowitz and Trager’s most innovative strategies. It deflects our attention away from finding out what happens next in the story, and into the hidden poetic content in the actual sounds of words, a process which is aided throughout by the constant slowing down of everyone’s speech. Another example: one of the muses takes a drag on her cigarette, and the gesture is isolated, given an unnaturally loud foley sound. These muses lounge with champagne glasses on beanbag chairs, like people at an art opening. The muses literally muse; most of their conversations are rambling speculations about the nature of cultural signifiers. But these signifiers are foregrounded in the film, and become it’s substance and subject.
The climactic party scene (supposed to be the bickering couple’s Recommitment Ceremony), becomes a comic meeting ground for Sasha’s starving bohemian friends and Mani’s one-percenter crowd. As might be expected, when inviting the unwashed hordes into the parlors of the wealthy, they discreetly pocket small, expensive-looking sculptures throughout the evening. It’s as if they’re trying to even the imbalance of of power by stealing the work of other artists.
Mani enlists his two sons from a previous marriage as the evening’s entertainment, his own little slave artists, an amateur jazz duo. Unsurprisingly, they rebel and refuse to perform for this father who neglects them. The rebellion of artists is easy for them as rich boys, and they have little to lose. One of the caterers at the party, undoubtedly a starving artist herself, performs a kind of party trick where she makes a coin appear. (It’s emblazoned with a dollar sign.) This wished-for magic act, the ability for artists to make money pop into their lives, is the fantasy which the film is examining.
In a later episode, filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh has a walk-on part, a passerby who comments that in Candide, Voltaire posits a community based on “no ties other than shared disillusionment.” That’s the only kind of community possible, it seems, for a couple like Mani and Sasha, whose class antagonisms have caused so much suffering. We’re all just people, placed by fortune in different social positions, Moskowitz and Trager seem to be saying. If we’re going to move beyond capitalism, we’ll have to give up not just material prosperity, but cherished dreams.
After breaking up, the couple’s reconciliation takes place completely wordlessly. They have to strip away not only their material possessions, but language itself, along with their history and received notions. This is the only way they can meet one another: simply as bodies, but bodies filled with emotion and desire, their humanity enriched, rather than diminished by the stripping away of words.
It takes place in a cave on an island, not a platonic cave, but the cave where man’s initial impulse to make art was born, by painting on the walls. The soundtrack to the final episode, with only the occasional dripping of water, since both the music and dialog have been eliminated, sounds luxurious and refreshing, after twelve episodes of being immersed in fancy, and often misleading terminology. The viewer, like the two lovers, is re-grounded in bodily, sensory experience. An improbable utopia of a sort is imagined, and the closing credits are accompanied by a crazily amateurish rendition of the song Danny Boy, in which the very clumsiness of the musician’s search for at least tiny moments of beauty is touching, in a goofy kind of way. Somewhere, hidden inside just this kind of anarchic goofy clumsiness, the promise of art is still hiding and waiting for us. Two Russians in the Free World holds out this implicit promise to the viewer, and Moskowitz and Trager’s fantastically imaginative and original creation bears ample evidence to the validity of the promise.
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