Generation P

Plot synopsis:
Generation P, adapted from Victor Pelevins iconic Russian bestseller, follows the strange adventures of Babylen Tatarsky as he evolves from a disillusioned young man in the drab days of post-Communist Moscow to the chief creative behind the virtual world of Russian politics.
When Babylen was a Young Pioneer, his generation received a gift from the decaying Soviet state in the form of a bottle of Pepsi, of Russian manufacture. Not just a beverage, it was also a symbol of hope that some day a new, magical life would arrive from the other side of the ocean. The arrival of this life, and the way it transformed these ex-Pioneers, is what our film is about. In the early Nineties, Tatarsky, a frustrated poet, takes a job as an advertising copywriter, and discovers a knack for putting a distinctively Russian twist on Western-style ads. But the deeper Tatarsky sinks into the advertising world, the more he wonders if he has sacrificed too much for money. His soaring success leads him into a surreal world of spin doctors, gangsters, drug trips, and the spirit of Che Guevara who, via a Ouija board, imparts to him the dazzling theory of WOWism, about how television destroys the individual spirit. Though named in honor of Lenin, Babylen opts instead to believe in his Babylonian destiny, and secretly searches for the beautiful goddess Ishtar, who becomes for him a symbol of fortune. Meanwhile, the people around Babylen - clients, colleagues - perish in the violent dog-eat-dog world of new Russian capitalism. In Nineties Moscow, this is taken as the ordinary course of daily affairs. Tatarsky is invited to join an all-powerful PR firm run by a cynically ruthless advertising genius, Leonid Azadovsky, who invites Tatarsky to participate in a secret process of rigged elections and false political advertising. And as a result of his brilliance, Tatarsky achieves the ultimate, as he creates and gets elected a "virtual" president. But like Faust selling his soul to the devil, this ex-humanist gradually descends to the level of a reprobate, finding that he no longer belongs to himself, but is trapped in a virtual world of his own creation. Babylen returns to his Buddhist friend Gireyev and takes hallucinogenic mushrooms, in attempt to re-create his previous experience. This time Babylen enters the Babylonian dream that has inhabited his sleep for so long. In a ritualistic Sumerian initiation, Babylen replaces Azadovsky as head of the Agency and becomes the earthly husband of Goddess Ishtar, the object of his obsession. There, he is offered control of the mechanism that produces simple human happiness - and can control the world.

Tags: satire, murder

Review:
Good, and maybe even best adaptation possible.
If you have read the book, then you will like that movie did not tried to "improve" or "rethink" the original story, but stayed quite close to original, sometimes quoting parts of the book's text entirely.Cast is fine.
Don't let the sucky trailer full you, actors are playing fine and their characters are quite believable (except for maybe, Litvinova, but she has around 30 seconds on screen, so it does not matter).Visuals are good.
Not great, but good.
Its "slightly better 90s", with slightly more human bandits, and slightly cleaner streets.Sound is fine, and music is even good enough to wonder about buying a soundtrack...
There is always "but", and in this case - you MUST have lived in ex-USSR 90s, and you must speak Russian, to understand the movie.
It's very tightly rooted into post-soviet discourse, and without "cultural references" (c), i am afraid, the movie will be hard to grasp on.alternatively, if you have ever wondered about, or experienced altered states of consciousness, you might find it fun ;).
Masterpiece in its own right.
This movie enchants with its honesty and surprises with its ingenuity.
It shows an art-house-like alternative reality, which is an illusion.
Unlike art house the movie has a clear message and meaning, you just have to look deeper.
The alternative reality is also not really alternative, most of it is Russian reality now.
Essentially, if you are a fan of seeing things through the glasses of irony and satire, you are not afraid to wonder what is really going on in the world behind the mask of show and propaganda, the movie is for you.
I can't say it's about Russia only; it is a certain view of the world illustrated by the example of Russia.
What country doesn't know lost generations, brain-washing and power play?
Do not expect to be satisfied.
The story leaves much room for thought and conclusions.
Pelevin fans would be thrilled, those who didn't read the book will enjoy the movie nonetheless.
It would be wrong to compare it to the book, because this is the kind of book that is next to impossible to be screened, yet the director managed to do it with flying colors.
Besides, I can hardly think of any Russian movie with so much cursing, which makes the presented reality even more real.
Whatever your impressions of the movie, it is definitely worth your time..
Don't worry if you aren't Russian or haven't read the book.
It might even be better if you haven't read the book, but come in naively as I did and just start watching with no expectations.
Although this work of magical realism has a strong Russian flavor, it is as much about western civilization as anything else.
Ironically, one of the themes is that Russia produces no products, but the Russian pose has long been that it produces philosophical literature and this Certainly qualifies.
It also gives you a big taste of Russia that will inform someone who knows very little.
The "cultural references" may be specific, but the context usually gives you an idea of what sort of thing is being referenced.
I look forward to forcing my husband to watch it with me, and I wish I had more time to read, because the book must be really good...Now that I have seen it again, I look forward to reading the book, preferably annotated.
A second viewing means that you can catch more foreshadowing and thematic development.
I realized I had missed a few plot points, too.
The events of 2015 resonate strongly with this film and it looks like 2016 will be more resonant yet.
This film is available on Google, and I can't recommend it enough.
From prehistory to modern politics it has something to say.
It is funny as hell about some serious stuff..
localizing Che Guevara for Russia.
Viktor Ginzburg's "Generation P" is a satire on advertising, and the free-for-all that took over Russia after the Soviet collapse.
My favorite scene is where the main character imagines Che Guevara showing him how mass consumerism destroys the soul and turns one into a robot watching TV all day (like the characters in Mike Judge's "Idiocracy").A lot of the movie is filmed so that the audience isn't sure if the action is real or imagined (those mushrooms suggest the latter).
And then there's the title.
The P could stand for pop, Pepsi, Panasonic, or something else of that ilk.
Empty prospects for the generation that saw Boris Yeltsin shell the parliament building that he had previously defended, and then use the constitutional crisis to establish a nearly monarchical government.I recommend the movie.
The main character's immersion in one of the sleaziest worlds of all makes for an intense story.
Really good one..
A brilliantly told story about psychological manipulation in the modern world.
This film beautifully tells the tale of an advertising copy writer as he rises up in the world of Russian Busness.
This film is so well done that it borders on an "Art" film and the story is both intriguing and disturbing for the viewer because the mechanisms shown fully exist in the world we live in, and this is a "glimpse behind the curtain" of that dark and relatively unseen world.
Filmed with High production values the film showcases that indeed Russians are not only capable of making great movies but, that they can be done in a way that is every bit as entertaining and sophisticated as Hollywood.
A remarkably worthwhile watch even with the subtitles.
The story will provoke thought long after the film has been watched.
Highly recommend for folks that like intellectual storytelling!.
Come alive to it.
"Generation P" is one of those books that is fantastic as a prose work and that one never suspects could be adequately filmed for a movie.
The makers of the cinematic version clearly knew how ambitious they were being, working with this source, a lot of money and a lot of anticipation.
The result is very, very good.
But it doesn't capture some areas of where the source shines, while being very closely drawn from it and so inviting comparison.
It looks fantastic, both in terms of the creation of a fantasized nineteen-nineties within the look of physical objects and costumes in the film, and in the realization of excellent visual imagery to represent some of the less literal matter going on.
As a film, it's well timed, well edited, and well scripted such that it moves at a quick pace and is frequently insightful.
But one of the strengths of the source novel was its willingness to philosophize at length, and to delve into its hallucinogenic descriptions.
The film, in its desire to adapt the whole book, films a lot of events without the accompanying matter than justifies their inclusion.
Thus, I think they miss a lot of the most important and worthwhile matter of the novel.
We see Babylen eating hallucinogenic mushrooms and later LSD, but we only skim over the effects of them.
We see how he runs into Blo at his new job, but we have no time to be introduced to who Blo is.
We see that Yeltsin is being 3-D modeled and get some satiric value from that, but we don't get the full explanation that makes the idea so important and powerful.
Most importantly, we hear the hallucination of Che Guevara speaking, but he gets only a few lines spoken very quickly, and we almost miss the discussion (deeply emphasized in the book) of the three human impulses -- oral, anal, and wow -- and how they relate to commercialism.
Missing the emphasis on that feels like missing the point somehow.
They kept (sometimes line for line) the novels satires of commercials, but not of commercialism -- and therefore made the work considerably less potent.
I read that several firms were ironically given product placement in order to help finance the film; I hope that didn't affect any editorial decisions to weaken the message.
Overall quite an impressive film, but one that invites comparison with the source, and then fails to capture its spirit or satiric power in several key areas.