The Red Rocket

With the full-screen summons “Comrades!” director Marja Pensala makes clear early in her film what she wants to expose: the outdated socialist machinery of notions and the superseded ideals involved. In eight chapters – from “virginal birth” to “the seventh day” – she demonstrates how an oppressive utopia is exchanged for insubstantial freedom. For this purpose, she mixed black-and-white archival footage of flag parades and kissing Russians with contrasting present-day street scenes in colour. The self-made sounds and communist militant songs accompanying the silent footage lend this experimental film a comical effect. Man as a mere number in the dynamic machinery of the system has been replaced by the banality of a life, the ideals of which have disappeared or fallen into ruin like half-perished factory buildings. Chicks have become stray dogs; communist red has been swapped for sky blue. But in the meantime, the egalitarian worker has acquired a face: a car mechanic, a male and female factory worker, a potato farmer, an ex-soldier, a florist and a doorkeeper successively introduce themselves to the camera. A young woman, born in a country where labour used to be the highest good, now runs a nightclub where enjoyment is the sole purpose. Now that the socialist mask has been put down, the question is raised as to how much people like what they see in the “true face” appearing from behind it.