Taisia Deevva | The Cure / 2023

the other alternative

by Douglas Messerli

 

Taisia Deevva (screenwriter and director) The Cure / 2023 [13 minutes]

 

Much like Denis Liakhov’s The White Crows of the same year, The Cure deals with Russian homophobia and the necessity of proving one’s masculinity by visiting a local whore house. In the first film, the young gay hero, having returned home for a visit from the university, is made to undergo the ordeal to prove his sexuality to his brother and his friends, while in The Cure, it is the father who has apparently discovered something in his son Renal’s room that seems to suggest his son his gay.

     In the very first scenes of this short film by Taisia Deevva, who lives in London, but whose films are made primarily in Ukraine and Russia, Renal (Nikita Kochnev) comes running out of his family home, his father chasing after until he catches and begins to beat him, the mother attempting to prevent him, but the father simply pushing her aside, injuring her as well.

     It is Renal’s uncle, Dayan (Oleg Kamenshchikov) who finally takes things in hand, suggesting to his nephew that they go for a ride. When Renal asks where they are going, he responds that it’s “a surprise,” already a strong warning in a movie where he know most of the older males are fiercely patriarchal and cannot abide sexual difference in their families and homes.

     Just as in The White Crows, Dayan takes his relative to a private bordello, where the woman is of an age that even Renal begs to be given another choice. The prostitute suggests a younger girl nearby, and for double the price, Dayan takes Renal there and sends him off to bed with the younger girl.

    The 18-year-old prostitute attempts to comfort the 17-year-old boy, but it is clear almost immediately that Renal will not be able to even to get an erection. He begs the teen girl not to reveal the truth, which she agrees to do, keeping him a while longer in her bed to make sure that the others believe he has consummated the sexual act.

      When middle-aged Dayan sees that there are still 18-minutes left in the hour he has paid for, he takes the young girl to bed.

    In truth, even lying in bed with a woman appears to make Renal sick to his stomach, and in the manner of the central character in The Crying Game, who vomits after having unknowingly had sex with a transgender woman, Renal escapes outdoors to retch, a gesture I feel is not at all necessary to convince us that he may have been uncomfortable in pretending to fulfill his uncle’s and father’s demands. But, really, I can’t imagine that most gays, many of whom have at least attempted in their early days to explore the opposite gender, would have such a visceral reaction to being with a woman. Evidently, the director felt she had to prove Renal’s disgust for being part of the ridiculous ritual.

     Just for the record, since both of the Russian films I mention are so similar in plot, The Cure was released in England in March of 2023, while The White Crows, made in France, was released in September. There is every likelihood that neither director knew anything of the other film, which may only go to prove that this bizarre ritual of manhood is quite common in contemporary Russia.

What it does, obviously, is to force the child whose sexuality is in doubt to lie and go further into the closet with regard to family life, since the other alternative is quite obviously brutal violence.

 

Los Angeles, June 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).