Issue 83 (2024) |
Aleksandr Galibin: The Adventures of Little Bakha (Prikliucheniia malen’kogo Bakhi, 2022) reviewed by Venya Gushchin © 2024 |
In an interview with STV Sevastopol, actor and director Aleksandr Galibin speaks of his film The Adventures of Little Bakha as a direct challenge to Hollywood’s domination of family/children’s entertainment. The interviewer cites the words of Sergei Zernov, director of the Gorki Film Studio, who claims that a good children’s film is, to put a new spin on Soviet national policy, “American in form, Soviet in content” (Shulga 2023). In the interview, Galibin vehemently disagrees with the opinion, claiming that Hollywood children’s films have merely entertained and sanitized depictions of “real life” and calling for a return to “global values.” “Global values” was also the theme of the international film festival hosted by the film’s production center VGIK-Debut. The director and his interviewer are both very vague in terms of what these “global values” actually are, naming “love, friendship, family” when prompted. The vagueness of these “global values” is a common means of disguising conservative traditionalism. Both abroad and in the United States, Hollywood (and Disney in particular) has become the main object of critique for conservative movements that dispute its cultural hegemony. To be sure, Hollywood is becoming increasingly dominated by a few powerful corporations, and children’s entertainment in particular has suffered from the larger trend of sequels, remakes, and all other derivative productions—each increasingly becoming safer and safer investments. However, it is worth investigating what alternative vision directors like Galibin suggest to displace this hegemony, and if it is indeed truly an alternative at all.
Set in a small picturesque village in Dagestan, The Adventures of Little Bakha is composed of three novellas revolving around the eponymous mischievous young boy and his family—his parents, his grandmother, and his cousin Timur, who has recently returned from Moscow. Each novella centers on a particular instance of Bakha being left without supervision and forced to make decisions beyond his age. Over the course of the three parts, the young boy gradually becomes less destructive and learns to channel his youthful energy towards helping his family rather than ruining them financially. In the first novella, he is not warned that a recently bought bull is having a reaction to a vaccine, so he nearly kills the animal to put it out of its misery on the recommendation of a local villager. The second part dramatizes Bakha’s attempts to fix his own mistakes. When he accidentally knocks out the electricity, threatening the lives of unhatched chicks in the family incubator, he designs to steal a generator from the village grocery store. Though the boy does not make it back in time, all seventy chicks hatch to everyone’s relief. Finally, the third novella resolves the marriage plot around Bakha’s cousin Timur. The protagonist’s family is unable to pay for a proper wedding because of the grandmother’s medical expenses; the situation cannot be explained directly to Elime (the bride-to-be) and her family, so she assumes that Timur does not love her and has found another woman in Moscow. “If you loved me, you’d kidnap me!” she proclaims to him at one secret meeting, referencing the Caucasian practice anxiously alluded to through this segment of the plot (Elime’s father threatens Timur not to even dare consider it an option). Bakha texts Elime from Timur’s phone and explains everything in another secret meeting at sunrise, leading to mutual understanding from both families: All’s well that ends well.
Gender and gendered upbringing are key anxieties in The Adventures of Little Bakha. From the opening scene, when Timur comes back home from Moscow, Bakha is repeatedly told to grow up and, specifically, to become a man (the dialogue in the first scene in particular emphasizes the importance of heterosexual interest in women as a key part of maturation—Bakha says he’s still too young for that). After being chastised by his grandmother for needing to grow up, Bakha exclaims: “How can I become a man surrounded by you ladies?” His grandmother reproaches him, but almost playfully: both she and the film largely accord with this patriarchal worldview. The film’s commitment to depicting life without Hollywood’s varnish—created by the director’s use of unprofessional actors and his tight shooting schedule—mirrors the swift maturation Bakha is forced through: the viewer needs to grow up too. According to the film, male socialization is a process of curbing the boy-child’s destructive impulses for the service of society as a whole. Though the film makes particular reference to the experience of gender in Dagestan (most prominently the practice of bride kidnapping) along with other nods to other aspects of Dagestani culture (such as the traditional healer that Bakha and his grandmother visit), the plot is meant to be “universally recognizable.” This recognizability is part of the film’s commercial and critical success in Dagestan and other parts of Russia, with viewers frequently commenting on how touching and morally edifying it is.
Bakha’s narrative arc is the standard Bildungsroman template described as “global” by cultural theorists from Carl Jung to, most recently, Jordan Peterson, usually explicitly smuggling in a conservative worldview that smooths over this progression as “natural” and “universal.” Returning to his interview with STV Sevastopol, Galibin cites his own experience making two of his previous films Little Golden Fish (2016) and Little Sister (2019) in Kyrgyzstan and Bashkortostan, respectively, as proof that there are the same “global values” that undergird all cultures. Galibin refers to both shooting locations as “our [i.e., Soviet/Russian] former republics” (even though Bashkortostan is currently part of the Russian Federation), activating a nostalgia for the imperial greatness of the “good old days.” The soaring aerial shots of the Caucasus that punctuate the film cinematographically reinforce the imperial gaze, a common trope across media about the region. Though Galibin disagrees with the slogan of “American in form, Soviet in content,” the alternative he implicitly presents here is “national in form, “global” [i.e., Russian imperial] in content.”
Though Galibin’s film is trying to compete with Hollywood, its structuring premise—a young boy being thrust into circumstances unsuitable to his age when his family leaves—recalls one of the most enduring creations of the American culture industry: Chris Columbus’ 1990 holiday classic Home Alone, which follows Kevin McCallister defending his home from burglars after being accidentally forgotten by his family on their holiday trip. Despite the geographic, economic, and cultural distance between the affluent Chicago suburb and the remote Dagestani village (Kevin gorges on junk food and movies upon discovering that he is “home alone,” while Bakha only has a few more than his allotted share of candies), both films are rituals of initiation into adulthood—and manhood in particular—for boys considered too young in their respective cultures to fully take on the associated challenges. Furthermore, both protagonists are characterized by their creative attempts to navigate their respective societies, which under normal circumstances get them into trouble. Kevin gets repeatedly picked on by his family who eventually forgets him, while Bakha is repeatedly punished throughout the movie for his failure to meet his family’s admittedly age-inappropriate expectations. Like Kevin, Bakha learns to tame his outside-the-box thinking and wilder impulses to maintain domestic stability and the status quo: the Dagestani boy’s circumvention of social norms of matchmaking allows Timur and his bride-to-be eventually get together, just as the American boy’s creative use of Christmas toys as weapons allows for the protection of his family’s private property. Perhaps even in attempting to deviate from Hollywood, the film’s “global values” still bring a children’s filmmaker back to Hollywood. Even though Adventures of Little Bakha is far more committed to realism than Home Alone and aims, according to Galibin, to present life without Hollywood sanitization, it still relies on a shared narrative and ethical vocabulary.
After each disciplinary action, the adult (usually his grandmother or father) asks Bakha if he has understood what he has done wrong, prompting him to restate the lesson in his own words. The last time he restates the moral, Bakha cries out: “Everything that grownups say is nonsense [erunda]!” “Nonsense” is a word the little boy picked up from his cousin Timur and recurs throughout the film as he attempts to reconcile adults’ expectations of proper behavior with his immaturity. While diegetically the line refers to the cognitive dissonance between the responsibility thrust upon him and his age, extra-diegetically it functions as a failed promise to reexamine the core assumptions that undergird the film’s central conflicts. The young boy must learn to be mischievous in the right way so that the adults’ world continues to function. At the end of the film, Bakha is still caught up in grownups’ nonsense, even if the film claims otherwise.
Venya Gushchin
Columbia University
| Comment on this article on Facebook |
Works Cited
Shulga, N. (2023) “Aleksandr Galibin o filʹme «Prikliucheniia malenʹkogo Bakhi» (Kulʹturnaia sreda. 26 iiulia 2023).” Telekanal CTB.
The Adventures of Little Bakha, Russia, 2022
Color, 84 minutes
Director: Aleksandr Galibin
Script: Anna Veilert
DoP Anastasiia Trofimova
Composer: Aleksei Chintsov
Production Design: Viacheslav Vidanov
Editing: Anatol Solovei
Cast: Amir Magomedov, Zenab Gamzatova, Zair Aliev, Benevsha Devletkhanova, Arsen Khiramagomedov, Patimat Malaeva,
Production: VGIK Debut
Producers: Fedor Popov, Vladimir Malyshev, Anatolii Terent'ev,
Premier: 22 October 2022
Aleksandr Galibin: The Adventures of Little Bakha (Prikliucheniia malen’kogo Bakhi, 2022) reviewed by Venya Gushchin © 2024 |