A critical essay on an Armenian Masterpiece: Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev, a movie banned in Russia by Putin’s orders Edgar Baghdasaryan’s Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev
By Bedros Afeyan
Armenian News Network / Groong
It is remarkable when a director from a tiny country in great peril of physical extinction takes on the big ideas of the world and contributes substantially to the simultaneous chewing of the cud of Soviet and post-Soviet absurdity and tragicomedy with inventiveness, indomitable spirit, artistic audacity, and folkloric musical omnipresence through genres and timbres that help render the movie scintillating. I salute maestro Baghdasaryan who convincingly stops time in this movie and invents his narrative in that stopped-time space. Here there is no past or present except as partial echoes of distant and constantly distorted signals. And the future can learn from nothing since knowledge of the past is substantially wiped out by design and additionally by the rushed mad dash to oblivion we have all bought tickets to with our portable screens, dark room isolation which just feeds us porn of a million varieties. Historical porn, philosophical porn, political, junk music, junk aerial photography, drone porn, corny, sappy, drippy pornucopia. As Bob Dylan might have muttered: Everybody must get porned!
The difference between true art and junk porn (today’s cultural coin of the realm) is that the goal of the latter is not to continuously and ever more demandingly feed the exploring creative instinct. Junk porn satiates far less nourishing urges. It leaves no room for ricocheting afterthoughts or sweet aftertastes. It obliterates the satisfaction of prolonged, sustained engagements. It accelerates away rapidly and deflates concentration abruptly. It leads you to lose interest in all else with each hit of this attention numbing narcotic. To walk away from all that may be deemed constructive. An Armenian stone cross, for instance, took a hundred years or more to intricately carve during the Middle Ages, with expertise attained en route, passed on generationally, adhered to for posterity, or until Muslim hordes came to destroy and deny Armenian Christian priority to make themselves the only voice of the sick realm. That too is Armenian. Promoting a life without commitments or long-term goals because short term noisy and frictional satisfaction is all that counts more and more is where we seem to be headed.
Well, Edgar Baghdasaryan is sick and tired and quite disgusted with our helplessness facing this massive human migration away from meaning. And besides, what has the wider world fed the Armenian people anyway? What lies and deceptions? Those benevolent Russians or communists or Soviets, what misery have they wrought, lied and taught this naïve and lost people to simply love it, as if they found themselves in the hands of a dialectic materialistic almighty savior. Those brothers, those comrades, those contemptuous, maladroit, thick eyebrowed, vodka drowning mumblers of yore: the tavarish, derwish, swishing snakes.
Many men losing their faculties with old age will succumb to severe delusions. They will suddenly take themselves for Napoleon, or Ceasar, or Jesus. How much more practical would it be instead to make one of those larger-than-life characters into your own personal companion? A single character or a posy of them, all aligned and part of a chorus, good for a hang. In Yasha and Leonid, this is a central narrative device. Because this sewage factory valve operator was once by a fluke of Soviet stunts been invited to the 1976 Central Committee of the Communist Party gathering as a heroic Soviet worker. He has come to believe he is at par with Brezhnev. To weave the self-medicating story that Brezhnev took a liking to him and is always ready to hang out and spread wisdom and seek advice from poor and burning Yasha, now retired, staying in the sewage processing town which makes him smell like his x-job permanently, literally and figuratively.
This personal companion and Baghdasaryan punching bag “Brezhnev” has his own gang made up of the long-time communist dictators club including Tito, Honecker, Ceausescu and his wife, and Castro, and Ché (always with sidearms, cigars and beards of sorts), encapsulating what a sham communism looked like in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Later in the movie, African pretenders join the gang and add new dimensions to the absurdistan they had mutually created. All of them wine and dine with Yasha, fornicate and kiss, sing and folk dance, give advice and hand out magic Kremlin pills, entertaining and brainwashing Yasha by his own conjuring. These interactions are the meat and potatoes and the champagne of this film. They constantly show what poison communism was and how it crushed (not just) Armenian souls by not caring one bit about ‘citizens’ or ‘workers’ or their ‘paradise’ they were supposed to be building, safeguarding, and exalting.
Yasha has a wife and two kids, he has old friends in town, he has his retirement to enjoy, but he flight of fancy’s himself into being present at important historical events (like Zelig, like Gump) where Brezhnev was, as a personal counselor. Giving advice to the big oaf. The choice of Leonid is brilliant in and of itself, by far the dimmest of Soviet long-term leaders. Tall and burly Leonid indulges his venal senses, has a thing for ballerinas, is ruling an empire but always ‘helping’ Yasha, Jacob, Hagop, our zombie, meek, retiree, refusing to leave the shit and shitty town, despite the urgings of his wife and children.
How does “Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev,” the movie, stop time? By interlacing his domestic reality with this self-made and self-sustained fantasy which never changes nor conforms nor is it real except in his mind and in order to maintain some vestiges of his mental equilibrium. A status booster, a reality evader, a universe of non-possibilities, which is of course how the Soviet hell of a Union succeeded in dominating so many for so long in the first place. Making zombie citizens feeding on promises that are just Kremlin prepared narcotic placebo pills.
The scenes or settings that Baghdasaryan creates, so many of them extremely successful, enrich the horizons of this film. The absurd settings of elaborate hunts, lush meals, lazy walks, intensely clichéd discussions, all point to the permanent detachment of the CCCP leadership from its people. Yasha is like a pinball in a loud, well lit, tilting pinball machine. Bouncing from scene to scene while nothing changes, Time does not go forward. Time finds itself back on the grooves of an ideologically etched belt. However disconnected he is from his children, criticizing their choices, being stern, none of it matters. He has no power except in his fantasy companion’s domain timelessly reliving historical events with his mental toy, comrade general Secretary Leonid and his possy of miscreant sycophants.
The beauty in the film is also in the peeling off what Covid and lockdowns did to numbing and dumbing of Armenia or its ability to deal with its current enemies with mere capitulation. I must also note the superb use of music and sexual tension throughout the movie. Yasha has his own fantasy left over from his youth about large breasted Germanic women who devour him. Brezhnev’s posy dances Kochari! Yasha is an Armenian, shit factory loyal employee for 45 years. Yasha is the soviet slave of a fervent propaganda machine. They tell you what to think. They tell you what to feel. They tell you what you remember. You put those memories on a loop, dress them up a bit, and now who needs a life? You can play this broken record till your cells stop reproducing. Voila! Nirvana. And if you outlive this nightmare, what do you do after? How do you erase this hashish from your wishlist? How do you ever find your individuality, your vitality?
Edgar Baghdasaryan so well understands all this and shows its horrors that I can only salute him. This movie is a gem of humanity. A communist redux. A human alarm bell.
