Ksenia Ratushnaya | Аутло (Autlo) (Outlaw) / 2019

there are no taboos in nature

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ksenia Ratushnaya (screenwriter and director) Аутло (Autlo) (Outlaw) / 2019

 

It’s difficult for Europeans and Americans to even comprehend, perhaps, the extreme difficulties faced by a truly experimental film such as Ksenia Ratushnaya’s 2019 feature film, Outlaw. That it was even made, let alone briefly released in the West is amazing, not only given the Russian restrictions on any film that might even imagine describing itself as involved with gay issues, but the critiques of European and US critics who simply don’t know how to assimilate or relate to such a gay/transgender surrealist fantasy, particularly since nothing positive seems to occur for the LGBTQ figures in this film. But then, how could they, given the law passed in 2013 that portraying homosexuality in a positive light was made punishable by fines and imprisonment?

     In an interview in the on-line site Meduza and an interview with Samuel Goff in the New East Digital Archive, Russian director Ksenia Rutushnaya describes some of the difficulties in producing and, more importantly, finding distribution for her film.

      The Meduza article summarizes her problems:

 

“Released in Russia on October 29, the film Outlaw centers around a transgender woman living in the USSR and gay high school student living on the outskirts of present-day Moscow. The drama, which was filmed in Russia, has already been subjected to an inquiry by the Attorney General’s Office. A festival that screened the film in March was fined for violating Russia’s “gay propaganda law” and according to the filmmakers, other screenings were cancelled due to “a phone call from the top.”  The film also drew heavy criticism from LGBTQ activists, particularly inside Russia.

 

     I’ll reiterate the brief history that both interviews reveal. In 2017, Ksenia Ratushnaya, the owner of a noted public relations firm, wrote a film script for the first time in her life. She perceived it as an art-house drama for adults, centered around two timelines, one set in the Soviet Union of the 1980s which tells the story of a Soviet officer (Vitaliy Kudryavtsev), already promised to the daughter of one of the major generals of the Soviet military, who falls in love with a dancer at a nightclub, Nina (Vitaly Kudryavtsev) whom he soon discovers is transgender, but continues the affair nonetheless, even more in love with her after his discovery. The second somewhat intertwined story involves a young gay high school student, Nikita (Viktor Tarasenko) in modern day Russia who falls in love with the school tough, who also is the most popular boy in his class Alpha (Gleb Kalyuzhnyy), who befriends him while still taunting and bullying him simultaneously.

       The connecting link is that one of Nikita’s teachers, who attempts unsuccessfully to help ease Nikita’s unhappy relationship with his peers, may also be the same transgender figure who was beloved by the general in the 1980s, saved only because she ran away and transformed herself back into a male teacher who has been in hiding ever since, although mocked by his/her own students for his homosexual mannerisms.

      Overseeing Nikita and Alpha’s relationship is a woman, the rebellious outlaw of the title (Elizaveta Kashintseva), who with her partner Wild (Sergey Dvoynikov) seems to have been allowed governmental free-range to do to individuals whatever she wants, including entering a grocery store and slitting the throat of a bourgeoise customer and other actions, as long as they are confined to a permitted period of time. Going outside that limit, she determines to kidnap Alpha and seduce him, the wimpy Nikita amazingly uncovering her and Wild’s whereabouts and saving his high school lover/nemesis from whatever fate she had in store for him. Whether or not Alpha ever perceives that Nikita has possibly saved his life is left open, but it does appear that through his actions, Nikita has grown into a full human being who is no longer quite so fascinated with the popular classroom bully. The Outlaw is ordered to be punished for her behavior, but somewhat like the transgender dancer Nina, the Outlaw herself escapes, with even the governmental authorities unable to find her—another hint, perhaps, that not all anarchistic behavior can ever be successfully controlled.

      Film critic Anton Dolin described Outlaw in a way that seemingly moderates its quite eccentric and even in the US, rather radical sexual scenes: “It’s a normal youth film, moderately provocative, with several erotic scenes and representation of, let’s say, various sexual practices, including those that are commonly referred to as ’non-traditional’ in Russia. At the same time, there’s nothing that goes beyond festival cinema, as a rule, there’s no trace of any problems getting [it] into Russian distribution.”

      That said, it’s clear that director Ratushnaya certainly feared that she might be able to get a distribution license due to the belief that she may be violating Russia’s gay propaganda law. But since the film was aimed at an adult audience she had no problems in getting a license.

        Films without such a license can only screened at international film festivals approved by the Culture Ministry. But even those with a license such as the film The Death of Stalin have had their license revoked for “additional review.”

        Outlaw received a Russian premiere in March of 2019 at the Spirit of Fire Film Festival (“Dukh Ognya) in Khanta-Mansiysk, after it have been screened in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in the US.

     Evidently, there was some backlash among Russians belonging to the VKontakte site called “Typical Khanta-Mansiysk,” describing it as “an abomination,” which led other local residents to describe it quite negatively. Although the festival organizers expected protests at the festival, there were no incidents. The organizers had all spectators show them their passports with police on hand to confirm that there were no minors in attendance. The film won three awards at the Festival.

        But soon after, it became clear that the Attorney General’s Office had come to take great interest in the film, prosecutors asking why no one else had screened the film in Russia before its premiere. At the same time, according to Rataushnaya, no one contacted her. The first letter was delivered to the festival’s main sponsor, demanding to know why it supported LGBTQ propaganda. 

        The director, however, seemed to feel that the inquiry was instigated by a complaint from the children’s rights commissioner, although none of their departments or its officers responded to inquiries.

         But according to her interview with Samuel Goff, Rataushnaya observed, ““Before we started working on the film we didn’t realise the high level of anti-LGBTQ prejudice in the creative sphere.” The director herself declares she is not a member of the LGBTQ community, and continues in her interview with Goff speaking in a kind of naivete which for even an outsider from the Russian community, like myself, sounds somewhat insincere:

 

“The LGBTQ themes didn’t really complicate the process of pre-production and shooting, everything went smoothly without any governmental restrictions or prohibitions. The only thing we couldn’t do was use underage actors. I’ve long been interested in the histories, psychology, and fates of the LGBTQ community. I did have to read some studies into the lives of gays and lesbians in Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries (I wasn’t able to find any specific research on transgender people). I used a lot of what I learned from these books in the script. Of course, there’s also a lot in the film that comes from my own life. Whilst I myself am not LGBTQ, love is love and freedom is freedom for everyone.”

 

      There was, however, not to be much freedom after the movie was released for possible distribution and further offerings. The director of the festival, Larisa Zhuraveleva was fined 50,000 rubles (about $635) for “promoting non-traditional sexual relationships among minors,” even though there were no minors in the film and, as I have already reiterated, and no minors were allowed to view the film in the festival showings.

      Given the subject matter as I described above, although this is not a typical LGBTQ-oriented film, Ratushnaya and her producers rightfully described the work as an “LGBTQ drama” in their press releases. “We tried to formulate what the film could be called, if the two storylines are linked to LGBT people. In Russia, the easiest way to define it is to call it a LGBT drama. Though we understood that in a strict sense it isn’t an LGBT drama, it’s an art-house [drama]. We decided to present the film this way for simplicity,” the director states.

       Several LGBTQ activities called on the filmmakers to stop calling the film an “LGBT drama.” The writer for the queer culture magazine O-Zine, Anna Filippova, notes that when she first saw Outlaw in the fall of 2019 she gave it a positive review, but after seeing it again the following year, she “realized that it only nominally refers to the LGBTQ community and is in fact mainly devoted to teenage nihilism, drugs, BDSM.”

 

“An LGBT film should be representative, show their lifestyle, and the problems they face. Outlaw isn’t like that. It talks about anhedonia, coming off mephedrone, and depression. These aren’t the main problems that the LGBT community in Russia faces. They’re persecuted and killed here.”

     Although you can understand both the caution and the narrow expectations of Russia’s beleaguered LGBTQ community, what Filippova describes isn’t at all what really happens in the film. Both the transgender figure and the gay boy may certainly be tortured by the society in general, the outlaw forces in government, and the government itself, but they also both survive and become even stronger for their experiences. Despite the fact that the film spends also a great deal of time on so-called perverted heterosexual relationships, it is truly revelatory of LGBTQ difficulties in all societies, not even just in Russia. And its central theme, “There are no taboos in nature,” should find resonance in all LGBTQ communities. Finally, in the US today the definition of a film as art-house theater has little, if any, meaning.

      Director Ratushnaya herself, despite her pretended or real naivete was clearly moved in her film by almost a hodge-podge of gay and other sexual perspectives from film history.

 

 “In some scenes, even at the script-writing stage, I decided to employ references to Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Visconti’s Death in Venice, George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine, and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. That might seem like a lot, but really, I was more influenced by literature, painting, architecture, and other forms of art. Everything that I love went into Outlaw, a very strange and beautiful mix, my blood.”

 

     If I don’t precisely see the influence of those images in the film—although I do recognize several images related to Federico Fellini’s Satyricon and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange—I’ll still give her credit for creating one of the most remarkable works of cinema engaging LGBTQ figures in contemporary Russian cinema. And given all the challenges that involves, that is saying a great deal about this ultimately very entertaining if, at times, quite contradictory and perplexing film.

     Evidently, its distribution was limited to only a few theaters in Russia, and now that it has disappeared from Dekkoo, is apparently currently unavailable to most US and European audiences.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).