Night Watch

(Timur Bekmambetov, Russia)

By Eric Hynes

There are vampires. There are witches and spells and prophecies. There’s a convoluted sci-fi conceit, dependable slow-mo CGI, and whiplashing cuts as stylistically safe as they are epileptically hazardous. There are even characters referred to as “the One,” “the Other,” and—somehow neither a chemist nor a kegger—“the Funnel.” Yet for all of its clichés and blatant derivations, Timur Bekmambetov’s Russian blockbuster Night Watch, scheduled for North American release in July, might be the most nationally specific film ever to receive international distribution. Not since Trainspotting has a film’s global appeal been this reliant on the exoticism of local culture. You’re meant to associate Night Watch—the first of a planned trilogy—with its forebears The Matrix, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings. et al, but beneath the genre trappings and timeless trenchcoats is an uncanny distillation of life in Moscow circa 2004.

Night Watch , based on a bestselling novel by Sergei Lukyanenko (and co-written by Lukyanenko and Bekmambetov), opens with a gory confrontation in medieval France between a witch-burning army of Light and an animal-bones-accessorized army of Darkness. The evenly matched armies seem destined for mutual annihilation before a thousand-year truce is called, each side agreeing to police the domain of the other with a Night Watch and a Day Watch. The film bangs forward from this Gladiator-styleprologue to a Matrix-inspired set-up that introduces the hero, Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), the requisite theme of paternity, and, to the ordinary interiors of post-Soviet Russia, the spectre of the supernatural.

The standard alternate-reality yarn that follows maintains the underlit ambiguity required of the genre while fully integrating the particularities of contemporary Moscow . The Light crew is headquartered in the actual Moscow City Light Company, and the company car, though jet propelled, is the kind of rickety old lorry that still putters on the city’s streets. Perpetually thick traffic slows the crew’s pursuit of the Dark forces and, like everyone else, Night Watch drivers seem unconcerned with personal or public safety. Tacky New Russians run with the Dark forces, andproduct placements are as subtle as the building-sized billboards that blanket the city. Vampires are rebellious teens and junkies who petition the Light bureaucracy for scarce hunting licenses. Metro cars are overcrowded, the militia harass man, vampire, and “other” alike, and whether it’s from vodka or fresh blood, everyone looks drunk and no one seems to notice. Fantastical elements are in play, but nothing seems out of place. Even at its pandering, imitative worst, Night Watch achieves—through its wry hyperbolizing of Moscow ’s particular madness—the feel of a story spun from the city itself. Everyone knows the leagues of giant skulking crows and decrepit Soviet-era apartment towers are forces of darkness, and Night Watch provides the thrill of watching the metaphor take flight.

What brings the film crashing back to earth is its insistent, occasionally embarrassing self-consciousness. Like any film aiming for the widest possible audience, Night Watch tries too hard to please every conceivable viewer, especially Russian moviegoers accustomed to Western storytelling and production values. There’s a wearying “everything you can do I can do better” preoccupation with CGI and big-bang-boom action that often derails whatever narrative strands the film manages to establish. And as in Turkish Gambit, the most recent blockbuster from the same production team (led by the Bruckheimer-esque Konstantin Ernst), style gleefully sinks substance. A Turko-Russian War whodunit based on a pulp novel by wildly popular and prolific author Boris Akunin, Turkish Gambit sports a different director (Dzhanik Faiziyev) but very similar production values as Night Watch.In both films, dramatic potential is consistently thwarted by goofy, randomly applied stylistic flourishes, such as foregrounding a cute cartoon lizard while thousands of soldiers perish in the background, or bringing out the strings and slo-mo for the anthropomorphized descent of an Aeroflot screw through the atmosphere while the peopled jet does its plunging offscreen.

As in any other country infiltrated by US products and values, the popular response in Russia has included everything from joy to resignation to outright revulsion to cultural colonization. There have been recent attempts to stem the Western tide, but it’s hard to distinguish the will of the consumer from Vladimir Putin’s increasingly reactionary government. A new pro-Putin youth group named Nashi—a patriotic term meaning “ours”—claims to stand against, among other things, fascism, US imperialism, and liberalism. With peaceful revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine rippling through regions that Putin possessively refers to as “the near abroad” (and traditionally described as nashi), the time is right to fan whatever flames of Russian pride remain, be they nationalistic, geographic, anti-American, xenophobic, or Soviet. After years of Western domination of the Russian box office, state-controlled television station Channel 1 bankrolled Night Watch, gave it an aggressively synergistic marketing push—unprecedented for a domestic film—and succeeded in outdrawing the American imports for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union . Score one, nashi. Channel 1 and Konstantin Ernst continued the success this spring with Turkish Gambit, breaking the box office record that Night Watch established just last year.

As playful as these films are on the surface, they’re clearly products of the recent quasi-propagandist campaign that began with Putin’s silencing of the last of the free media outlets before his reelection in 2004. In Turkish Gambit, war is never justified or explained; it’s just a noble, indisputable fact. Neither Russian nor Turk is portrayed in a negative light—the real bad guys are the shady, opportunistic members of the foreign press. The lack of clear victor in Turkish Gambit echoes the prioritization of stasis in Night Watch. Triumph over evil isn’t the goal—it’s all about containment. While the United States enjoys the myth of itself as unvarnished warrior of freedom and goodness, the Russian myth manufactured here appeals to the more realistic and resigned sensibilities of a populace long scorched by utopian self-righteousness. In Night Watch, neighbours are to be helped when needed but never trusted, and rampant corruption is not only unavoidable but is rather convenient, within limits. The Light forces have their bad qualities—they break their own rules by luring licensed vampires with live bait—while the Dark characters, despite their homicidal tendencies, are sympathetic for being hunted, patient, and wise. Whom can you root for? The film gets behind neither horse. We’re held too far away from even the hero to care too deeply, and that seems to be the point. Except for self-delusional potshots at both abortion (in a country where abortions still outnumber live births) and babushka neglect (in a country whose post-Soviet policies have impoverished its pensioners), the film doesn’t make judgments or offer new solutions to the problems it illustrates so frankly. Things are bleak and corrupt, but they could be worse. Might as well stick with the status quo.

Now, with considerable chutzpah, and thanks to optimistic distributor Fox Searchlight, the producers are exporting their maiden copycat concoction out west, like a German jazz band or Yugoslavian car. Considering the nature of the film, it’s a strange path, one that could nullify its unique strengths while exposing its pale imitations. As sci-fi/horror/fantasy/medievalist mass entertainment, Night Watch is passable at best and inert at worst. But whether or not Bekmambetov, Ernst, Channel 1, or the Kremlin intend it as such, it’s a cheeky chock-a-block illumination of the state of things in the former Soviet state.

Night Watch

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