MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN

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These are fraught times. Across the globe, there appears to be a turn away from democracy towards dictatorships, all in the ostensible name of security and peace. George Orwell may have entitled his dystopian masterpiece 1984, but 2024 and beyond seem like a more apt departure point. What will stop this drift towards totalitarianism?

The answer is resistance. This does not mean violence (though it may cause governments to react with such), but a refusal to accept the lies foisted on us by autocrats. In Mr. Nobody Against Putin, from documentarian David Borenstein (Can’t Feel Nothing) and his co-director—and subject—Pavel (Pasha) Talankin, we meet one man who refuses to take yes for an answer. Through small gestures of defiance, he does his best to undermine the edicts of a mendacious and cruel regime.

Pasha Talankin, when first we meet him, is on his way out of the country, wandering in the woods at night. We soon learn why, cutting back to how it all began. The event coordinator and videographer for a K-12 school in Karabash—considered the most polluted town in the world, he tells us—Pasha is a happy-go-lucky, go-to mentor for the kids who don’t quite fit into the mainstream cliques. He attended this same institution, as well, and hopes to build the kind of community he wishes he had had while a student.

This seeming idyll is spoiled when Russia’s supreme leader, Vladimir Putin, decides to invade Ukraine in 2022. What follows over the course of the ensuing year is a series of edicts demanding changes in the curriculum, forcing teachers and administrators to adopt what can only be described as lesson plans straight out of a Hitler Youth program. Given that the official reasons for attacking Ukraine include a mission to root out Nazis, there is more than a little irony to this.

Most staff at the school do their best to get along, performing these new exercises for the camera (which Pasha dutifully sets up and turns on, as per his duties), starting over for a second take if they or their pupils make mistakes. Fortunately for the viewer, this footage made it out with Pasha, revealing the demented, grotesque and transparently forced proclamations of patriotic fervor that are now de rigueur, every day and every moment of every day. Unfortunately for those on screen, this is their new reality, which includes some of the young men we see heading off to war upon graduation.

But Pasha eventually finds ways to subvert the new order, and we watch, with admiration and trepidation, as he rebels. Will he get caught? After all, there are plenty of folks at the school and in the community who approve of Putin, even if many do not. That fear for his safety remains present throughout.

It’s a highly engaging film. Still, given that any opposition to the state is often positioned as somehow influenced by foreign actors, one wonders if Mr. Nobody Against Putin would not prove more effective with only Pasha’s name in the credits. We can just see good old Volodya (the common nickname for Vladimir)—along with people like Pasha’s rabidly pro-tyrant colleague Pavel Abdulmanov—dismissing the movie as the work of external agents. So be it. At least those of us not yet afflicted with despot disease can see the truth.

– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)

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