Little Vera (1988)

I hate this film. I saw it in a Russian theater at a late-night premiere back in 1988 and has never since then had an impulse to see it again. There is absolutely nothing about it to "understand" or appreciate. It is pure kitchen-sink trash disguised as a serious social study. You really think that the Soviets were all prostitutes, drunks, delinquents, and no-goods living off their parents? You believe that life in the USSR was hopelessly drab and that literally everything was so bad it's hard to see now how people still managed to survive in such a gutter of a country? Come on! As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union, I can swear on the Bible that nothing can be as remote from the truth as this portrayal of everyday Soviet life.It looks like "Little Vera" was made with two goals in mind: to defame everything Soviet and to make a big buck out of showing some insipid soft-core sex, nudity, and drug use. Admittedly, it achieved both goals. The only reason that anyone may still be interested in seeing this garbage is that it seems to have been the first of what would become a wave of similarly themed films in the late 1980s–early 1990s. Those films offered increasingly graphic depictions of nudity, sexuality, rape, and violence mixed with zoological anti-Communism and peddled sluts and mafia soldiers as role models. Don't get me wrong – I'm a big fan of Western sleaze and all things exploitation (what else one would want to watch in post-Soviet Russia?), but "Little Vera" is different. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

It's alarming, to say the least, how little the English speaking world knows about Russia's past. Everyone keeps saying Russia, but I grew up in the Soviet Union, and I can't really call it an exclusively Russian film like everyone else. Ironically, this movie was filmed in Zhdanov(Mariupol), which is now a part of Ukriane. The director chose this city because that's where he was from and he wanted to show the reality of life there. This city always been a ghetto. Now it's even worse, since that part of Ukraine is engulfed in a civil war. So the hopeless openededness of this film was right on point. Unfortunately, I have a feeling the main character would most likely die sometime in the 90's to early 2000's. Even moving wouldn't help, cause the whole area of the former Soviet Union later became a total cesspool of violent crime and drug/alcohol addiction.During the late 80's, right before the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a plethora of similar films, but for some weird reason only this one was known outside of the country. There were films with worse sex scenes before and after this one, and unlike many other countries, there was no censorship, so TV was full of nudity at the time. So I am really confused why this was praised for a "sex scene", or "rock n' roll"(?!). This film is none of that. This era of Soviet film was actually called "Chernuha" which translates as darkness, despair, gritty. Films during this time were full of realism, had this art-house vibe and yet very genuine acting, and always had a somewhat hidden psychological or philosophical dilemma in it. Sounds like Oscar's winner Moonlight. Indeed, if Moonlight took place in the 80's Soviet Union, and instead of drugs people were drinking, it would fit right in. Some scenes are almost identical with those Soviet films. (i.e. filming a pot on a stove for a good 1 minute or so, or a character is staring at something or thinking for a long time.) I actually seen a lot of them when I was a kid, but it took me decades to watch most of them again. Many never been preserved and therefore are in a very bad shape and some I still can't find, so they were pretty much lost during the switch to the digital format. During the 90's, Russian society rejected everything from the Soviet era. Even this film would have probably been lost if it wasn't for this unusual international hype about it because of some naive sex scene. There are some odd moments in the film that I only noticed when I watched it as an adult. There is really good and rare collector's items Italo-Disco(CC Catch) blasting from TV during the house party. A phenomena of an underground music style in North America that was only played at gay clubs, was actually a mainstream thing in the Soviet Union. Then there is a clear pedophile situation at a cafe between a man and a very young girl. Another strange scene is where Vera gets accidentally hit by a pot in the head by her drunk girlfriend with a black kid. It was also sort of disturbing to see how she was calling him names and screaming at him when she was drunk, which followed by a scene where he was alone watching a silly cartoon on TV about staying away from Africa because it has dangerous animals, while it's very obvious that life for this kid with black skin in that hell hole of a town is probably worse than being in an African jungle...The film is as real as it gets. The life was like this for most of the Soviet Union back then. So I definitely would recommend it as a learning artifact. Also Vera means hope. So the name of the film in Russian means also "A very little hope".

Forget every spy movie you've ever seen - this is what life was like in the USSR, and still is in many places in Russia and the ex-Soviet countries. Vera dreams of life of leisure, as she imagines the West to be; her reality is very different, with a bitter mother, a violent father, and the ever-present alcohol. And her prospects for the future are not much better. She finds a man and they try to patch up a life together, but he is afflicted by the same environment, both socially and physically - the scenery in this movie is brilliant, sitting comfortably in the company of post-apocalyptic movies but obviously done with no special effects; they have just walked in and shot whatever happened to be in front of the camera.Forget your stereotyped, cold Russians of spy movies. This is the Real Deal: people are passionate, vibrant, and present in a way you'll never see in a drama from the West.

One of the major aspects of "Malenkaya Vera" (called "Little Vera" in English) is that it was the first movie from the Soviet Union that featured a sex scene, albeit a short one. The title is important: Vera is the Russian word for "faith", identifying that punk Vera (Natalya Negoda) has little faith in the Soviet system. And as the movie shows, there's not much faith to be had in it. The opening scene shows the bleak industrial town of Zhdanov, nearly a hell on earth. When Vera's lover Sergei (Andrey Sokolov) moves in with her family, it leads to some unexpected events.Like in many Russian movies, people's names describe their characters. For example, there's Viktor (remember that "victor" means winner). All in all, this is a good look at the Soviet Union while it was collapsing - and we can see why it was collapsing. Really good.