Red Star Rising

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If you really want to understand Russia," the country's fallen arch-oligarch Boris Berezovsky once said, "all you have to do is watch Brother." The 1997 film and its 2000 sequel Brother II are arguably the most popular Russian films of the post-Soviet era. They still play in cinemas far from Moscow, and an estimated 5 million video copies have been sold. Both films star Sergei Bodrov Jr., who makes teenage girls across Russia swoon. Berezovsky was referring not to Bodrov's looks but to his character Danila, who becomes, almost by accident, a hit man. Returning home to St. Petersburg from the war in Chechnya, he soon finds himself in St. Petersburg saving his older brother from a debt-seeking gang. Danila discovers his ability to kill in cold blood and develops a romance with a hip, big-city girl. The film alternates between the worlds of the knuckle-headed mobsters (whom Danila kills off one by one) and the underground parties of young St. Petersburg (where Danila, a provincial, is out of his depth). The combination, for Russian audiences, was irrestible. The film attained instant cult status and Bodrov's character, the hitman with a heart, became etched into post-Soviet culture.

In reality, Bodrov is a sweet-faced, soft-spoken 29-year-old who shuns fame and Moscow's club life, opting to spend time with his young wife and two-year-old daughter. He had never acted professionally when his father, well-known Soviet director Sergei Bodrov Sr., asked him to stand in for the lead in Prisoner of the Caucasus, a bitter 1996 commentary on the Chechen war. Though his movies have become hits, Bodrov has seen little of the profits because Russia is plagued by video pirates.

This year, however, he managed to attract enough backing to direct his first feature, Sisters, now playing in Russia and set to tour European and North American film festivals later this year. It is a tale of two sisters, with different fathers, who are forced to come together to survive: an eight-year-old who is the spoiled brat of a new-money "entrepreneur" and a 13-year-old whose father left their mother long ago. Bodrov describes the plot: "The younger girl lives a lavish life — skiing trips, French lessons — but lacks traditional Russian values. The older sister, on the other hand, has been brought up with traditional values — a work ethic, religious piety, and so on." The two cannot stand each other but are forced to make a run for it when the Mafia moves in on the rich father and tries to kidnap his daughter. "It's a parable of our times," says Bodrov. "A story that tries to show us what drove these sisters apart — the divide between old and new values, between rich and poor — and yet how these sisters need each other to survive."

Sisters has been received warmly, but Bodrov concedes it will never reach the lofty status of the Brother films. Their sharp, nationalist dialogue has entered the local lexicon and is quoted regularly by both Moscow politicians and soldiers in Grozny. To be sure, xenophobia and a crude anti-Western attitude pervade the films. Critics complained that a hit man had become the dream occupation of Russian boys. But the films' strength is that Danila is far from the average Mafia thug. He is an introverted lover of alternative rock who wanders frozen cities like a Russian Stephen Dedalus, trying to make sense of it all, befriending the homeless and saving prostitutes.

Danila's homicidal ways, however, have drawn the ire of the Russian Orthodox Church. One priest even begged Bodrov to have his insouciant executioner repent in a new film. "Repentance after all is a cornerstone of Russian faith," says Bodrov. "And Danila shows no repentance." But it is precisely the young killer's lack of remorse that makes the films so intriguing. "Danila's a killer," Bodrov says. "But he's not a perfect killer. Sometimes he kills those who are guilty of murder, sometimes he kills people who are innocent. But he is trying to bring order, even this most brutal kind of order, to a world without any order at all." Bodrov's famous character may not be the best of role models, but he is a good mirror of Russian society today.