By Anna Malpas / AFP
A lone heroine fights off giant monsters and sinister masked warriors in “August 8,” a Kremlin-funded blockbuster that gives the Russian view of the country’s 2008 war with Georgia.
Almost entirely financed by the government, the film came out after Georgia last year backed a Hollywood version starring Andy Garcia as its president Mikheil Saakashvili.
Izvestia daily praised the film, which depicts a young Muscovite’s search for her son around the town of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia — a breakaway region of Georgia — after both unwittingly stray into the war zone, as a “symmetrical response to Hollywood.”
Hundreds died in the brief war beginning Aug. 8 that saw Russian forces pour into neighboring Georgia to repel Tbilisi’s attempt to retake the Kremlin-backed rebel region.
Bursting with special effects, the war is sometimes shown through the eyes of the woman’s traumatized and injured child as a battle between benevolent smiling robots and scaly monsters.
President Dmitry Medvedev recently praised “August 8” for keeping the memory of the war alive and reinforcing the view that Georgia was first to attack.
“The film has a very important mission to tell the truth,” he said.
At the premiere late February, director Dzhanik Faiziyev insisted it was not a political statement.
“We didn’t give ourselves the task of setting out any political accents. We wanted to make a film about a sweet girl, about her heroic journey, about how she tried to find her life, to find herself,” he told AFP.
But Russia is still aggrieved at international support for Georgia and its vehemently pro-Western leader Saakashvili over the brief but bloody conflict, and the film was financed by a fund that promotes patriotic cinema.
Sergei Tolstikov, the CEO of the Cinema Fund, set up by the government to support national films, told AFP the film cost over $10 million, and that the fund gave “around 90 percent.”
On its first weekend, the film came second in the box office to US action film “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance,” making $4.8 million on 1,500 screens across the country, according to ProfiCinema website.
The subject is inevitably political, Tolstikov said.
“We’re not going to pretend that these events took place in a fantasy country,” he said.
“It was a very complex and difficult time, and there is a political element. Many of our peacemakers and citizens died. This affected the country very strongly. When these guys came to us with this idea, it would have been wrong to say no.”
The film has scenes starring Russian President Medvedev (played by big-shouldered hunk Vladimir Vdovichenkov) and square-jawed Russian troops who laugh at danger and love their mothers.
In contrast, the heroine comes under fire from black-masked Georgian troops whose faces are not shown until the very end, when one soldier takes pity on her.
Saakashvili, who was demonized by Russian media during the war, is nowhere in sight.
The director said he deliberately did not show Georgians’ faces because he believes rank-and-file troops were not to blame for the conflict.
“In Russia no one has a bad attitude to Georgian people as such. No one sees Georgia as an enemy,” he said.
“This was one of those rare wars when the soldiers had no personal motive, and so I didn’t want people to look into the eyes of the people who shot at us.”
Moscow’s position on the war comes through clearly, despite the fantasy elements, one prominent Russian critic said.
“The fact is that the film justifies Russian foreign policy, depicting Georgia as the aggressor,” wrote Lidiya Maslova in Kommersant business daily.
Soon after the war, Russian television ran a propagandistic drama called “Olympius Inferno” about an American caught up in the conflict whose eyes were gradually opened to Georgian excesses.
Last year, “Five Days of August”, a Georgian-US project directed by Renny Harlin of “Die Hard 2” that depicted the conflict as Kremlin aggression, premiered in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.
With action scenes, a love story and a cute child actor, the new Russian film hits all the Hollywood buttons. It even attempts a rerun of the famous faked orgasm scene from “When Harry Met Sally.”
The style is no accident, since the screenplay was co-written by an American, former Newsweek war correspondent turned scenarist Michael Lerner, who said at the premiere that his inspirations included “Terminator 2.”
“I think what they wanted was somebody who understood structure,” he told AFP.
Russian senator and television host Alexei Pimanov said at the premiere that the film was equal to any American effort.
“Technically this is a breakthrough film, it’s really made just like in Hollywood,” he said.
