Laughter: An Act of Russian Patriotism? Film Tests Capacity for WWII Humor

By Ellen Barry

The new addition to the Russian pantheon of cinematic World War II heroes, a Soviet agent who has infiltrated the SS, has an unfortunate habit of waving around his passport, which is stamped with gold letters reading “Working Spy of the Soviet Union.”

Oleg Dolin, the star of “Hitler Kaput!” – a low-brow farce that opened Thursday in Moscow cinemas – dozes off while stealing top- secret documents, accidentally photocopying his face. He launches into a sentimental rendition of “Kalinka,” probably Russia’s most familiar folk song, at a Nazi watering hole. While groping a busty radio operator, he accidentally runs over people with a tank, making splattering sounds. In short, he is an idiot.

This would hardly be unusual in the United States, where filmmakers have long since overcome any queasiness about mocking sacred cows, whether nuns, Moses or the Pentagon.

But Russia is different. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is called here. Sixty-three years after the Germans surrendered to Marshal Georgi Zhukov in Berlin, Russians still speak of the war with dread and reverence.

No fictional character better embodies that reverence than the double agent SS-Standartenfuhrer Max Otto von Stirlitz, the hero of “17 Moments of Spring,” a 1973 television series. Russians still adore Colonel Stirlitz.

No less a fan than President Vladimir Putin, then the president and himself a former KGB officer, in 2003 decorated Vyacheslav Tikhonov, the actor who played Stirlitz, telling him that his character had helped shape an entire generation of Soviet youth.

It was characters like Stirlitz, and the cult that has arisen around them, that the director Marius Weisberg hoped to skewer in “Hitler Kaput!” Weisberg, 37, said he expected to be accused of betraying the motherland. (His film features gag footage of the Yalta Conference in which Stalin is shown whacking a waiter over the head with a vase.) But he hoped that the movie would serve the higher purpose of nudging Russians away from their nostalgia.

“For me, it’s a very patriotic act,” Weisberg said. “It forces you to laugh. It forces you to say goodbye to certain complexes.”

That, of course, is a matter of opinion. On Wednesday, the Communists of St. Petersburg and its surrounding area formally called for the Culture Ministry to prevent “Hitler Kaput!” from opening in theaters. They warned that the film would “damage the health and moral condition of veterans of the war, victims of the blockade and all who respect the memory of dead Soviet soldiers.”

In actuality, they said, “Soviet intelligence officers sacrificed, every day carried out the most difficult work in exhaustion, risked themselves, outsmarted the enemy intellectually and spiritually, and in this common fake, the central character – supposedly a Soviet patriot – endlessly performs Western dances, sings, drinks booze and goes to bed with any woman who appears on the scene.”

Weisberg, like “a gazillion Russian kids,” as he put it, was raised on World War II nostalgia. Soviet television rebroadcast the cherished “17 Moments of Spring” in its entirety every year. During that 13-hour block of time city streets emptied and the crime rate dropped.

The original series is notably cerebral, defined less by James Bond-style stunts than by deep contemplation on the hero’s part. In one beloved scene, the Soviet secret services allow Stirlitz a single meager contact with his wife: She is led to a table in a Berlin cafe; he is allowed to gaze at her from across the room, smoking intensely, as melancholy piano music plays in the background.

“All he does the whole movie is think,” Weisberg said. “That is extremely funny, especially for a Western mind, which is so action- driven. You’re watching a dude think for 13 hours.”

No one would accuse Weisberg’s hero of thinking. His double agent listens with a stethoscope at heating vents outside Hitler’s office. He whiles away time by building scale models of the Kremlin out of Plasticine, which he hurriedly conceals when SS officers stop by.

The Nazis come off no better, of course. Hitler is portrayed as a gibbering cocaine fiend who creates mock battles on his desk using potatoes. The point, Weisberg said, was not to make light of the war but rather of “how the war was actually sold by the Communists to the masses.” Young Russians, especially, should be fashioning new heroes to succeed Stirlitz in the pantheon, he added.

Still, as people filed out from Weisberg’s film on opening day, almost all wanted to talk about the past.

Andrei Novikov, 53, nearly shuddered as he left “Hitler Kaput!” (which he said he watched because he had two hours to kill in Pushkin Square). Parody, he said, “had no place in such important events.”

Yevgeny Komarov liked “Hitler Kaput!” just fine. He is 43 and not far removed from the war; his grandfather died during the siege of Leningrad. He thanked God for the soldiers who had taken up arms for Russia – thankful “that such people existed in the world.”

As for the movie – sure, it would be possible to enjoy it, he said, especially with the assistance of liquor. “Go ahead and laugh,” he said. “Remember, we won the war.”

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.