A Perestroika Version of Stalker by the Director of Peculiarities of the National Hunt.
A father and his 15-year-old daughter, who is seriously ill, discharge themselves from a foreign clinic. Their only hope of a cure is a secret journey to the «zone, ” a closed territory that was the site of an atomic disaster. Journalists say that it is inhabited by mutants with superpowers.
The Third Planet by Aleksandr Rogozhkin, director of The Chekist, The Cuckoo, Streets of Broken Lights, and a series of films about the peculiarities of the national character, is extremely strange, and not only within the context of this Russian director’s oeuvre. The film incorporates all of the cliches of late-Soviet and perestroika-period sci-fi: radioactive pollution, spiritual mutant healers, mysterious bad guys in hazmat suits, and army firing squads. However, Rogozhkin combines them with such freedom and boldness that The Third Planet incorporates the key ideological anxieties and fantasies of the boundary between the Soviet and contemporary histories of Russia. Here, there are dreams of developed capitalism and peasant huts and herbal healers; fantasies of a Christian spiritual renaissance and yearning for the pagan rituals of the Slavs; the nightmare of totalitarianism and fear of the limitless pursuit of profit. The film attempts to balance both auteur form and genre elements (including rather bold erotic episodes). The result is odd, but that is why this unique document of a surprising time is of interest.
The Third Planet
Director Aleksandr Rogozhkin
USSR, 1991, 93 min. 12+
