MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS part 1: LAST AIR IN MOSCOW

(All-too-brief thoughts in the intermission after seeing parts 1 to 3 (before everything falls apart and, as we are told repeatedly in text at the end of each part, everyone we see will more or less be in exile after February 2022):

You feel like at first "wait, is this all this will be, hanging out with these independent journalists and newscasters at the last Independent media outlet in Russia in late 2021?" And yes, that is what it is. But that is what is great and unique and special about it: the intimacy of the film, for lack of a better term, is that you are there with these women (mostly women) who have seen some shit and are hanging on to their independence - albeit as "Foreign Agents" as we are told repeatedly has to be what is is - and we get closer to them through their conversations and frustrations and the constant oppression of so many many years under Putin.

A not insignificant thing on my mind while watching this was also... how many times have I, as an American, looked upon Russia as "hmmph, how can Russians not have some kind of resistance or opposition to what is happening around them," and what hits me square in the head a second after this is "Well, Jack, think about how much of the rest of the world looks at your dumb American ass and how much the media coddles and/or softens what goes out there about trump and the other fascist enablers, and how rare it is to get a press like Rain in Russia that actually pushes back against the powers that be," and there is that.

I don't mean to make that some "oh, my eyes have been opened" sort of thing. I had some sense there must have been some resistance in the media to Putin - albeit more around the times of Navalny before he was squashed despite everything he did or tried to do - but the film very directly puts it to the audience, in America watching but throughout the world, that just by these women and men working and operating as much as they can given the circumstances, it shows an example that others can and should follow. Like as if to show and say implicitly as well as explicitly that human beings who have critical thinking and compassion and some sense of how to "keep the record" as it were (we even hear at one point about the blatant corruption of the court system) exist and the world of the oppressors is not... total.

It has a strong ethos about what it means to even have journalism and what it means to do that vs something else (why not go into PR one of the newscasters is asked, and this vulnerability and real goodness comes through in her response: it doesn't help people, like as bad as the pay is and how much it may not help a lot of people, if it helps someone that is what matters), but the pathos is even stronger of just what these women see and deal with, through yhe courts, through the thumb always being at the ready to be pressed on the heads of anyone who god forbid may not have a Foreign Agent disclaimer over a newscast (think of the children, they say), and how it is always about finding a way to keep the screws tight.

What is also relevant? Well, for one thing, when one of the women talks about how indifferent everyone becomes in this system, how people are not political and keep their head down and don't do a thing to buck the system and make life about themselves. Sound familiar? And if you want to know how relatable these ladies are - they (hate) watch Emily in Paris just like you do (though they wonder how they can be *that* dumb) and Harry Potter (which is a bigger part of the latter section of the movie) - they see much of the same stuff we do.

........................

(Parts 4 and 5)

"... I dont have a country anymore."

Can you imagine feeling like "well, that's not me" and knowing that if you were being bombed by someone youd hate you, too, when thinking about how another country looks at an aggressor (re: US)? The employees of the Rain TV network sure could and did!

I am struck even more in these more conventionally gripping but no less audacious in executions segments - audacious in the sense of how much time Loktev has us spend and makes the time felt on film, like how long we are with the young women in the car at night while they wait for hours on end for their colleague who has been detained for happening to be on a bridge as a "No War" protest broke out - how even with what they knew and had seen with Putin for years still shocked them as much as it did the rest of the world.  Or, maybe to amend that, if not shock then certainly disgust, both with him and even to a large extent their own nation (the internalized shame of a people over the "elected" leader, who everyone knew was scum and how long he was in power and how little was done to get him out, also relevant!)

But more than anything parts 4 and 5 are what all of that time in first three parts pays off narratively speaking. While the director is not exactly Fly on the Wall, since this is more edited than Cinema Verite usually gives us and the camerawork via the iPhone is the way it has to be (but allowing for such intimacy one of the subjects who is crying a whole lot speaking to a loved one has to acknowledge that she would do the same in her line of work), we get so close with Anna (who seems to be the main subject until she leaves), Irina, Sonya, Aleysa and Ksenia among others, in those first parts anyway that we can't help but hope they get out alive.  

It should be something that doesn't have shape to it early on, like those many parts where Anna is talking to the director in the car about this and that involving the forms of oppression both direct and more about thought and language - what can you say or not say in public is a major bone of contention involving her own child - or during those long dinners where we even have a lot of time to see what they are cooking for the meals.  But Dektov is smart about what we are seeing as gradually building up a kind of empathy and compassion for these women and hoe they are these "Foreign Agents" who are already targets by the State since they are part of the last network (subscriber based, no less) that just reports... the news. 

It may be because of the time of year I am seeing this, but the whole of part 3 in particular being set around New Year's - we are also told in a country that largely did away with religion for decades has New Year's as the one exception - and that creates a dramatic dynamic that is seen on the news segments themselves and in how there is little to be that happy about the country as it stands by the end of 2021 (keep in mind this was after Alexei Navalny was taken away but before his horrible demise).  But it also creates for Dektov time to see everyone in aspirational and happy spirits; if she had scripted this it would almost seem too obvious, yet in reality it just reaches a culmination for what we have already seen in the previous parts (set in October and early December of 21 respectively).

There is so much here to digest, from the role of news as an entity to what it means to show straight on facts and confront exquisite bullshit from the State (both in terms of policy and actual official jerkoffs who go on camera and just say lies over and over again), and what kind of toll it takes on someone who has to make this kind of life as much of a calling as a consistent profession.  I have to think this would still be a captivating look at journalists under a notorious regime has the invasion in February of 2022 not taken place, but Right Place and Wrong Time and the openness and both intellectual and emotional engagement of the subjects makes this one of the most vital and important and sobering documentaries of the decade.