Firebird - a film review

The gay liberation movement, like other social and political efforts to secure freedom from discrimination, is a long and painfully slow process. You don't change people's convictions overnight, and breakthroughs like giving women the same rights as men and blacks the same rights as whites and LGBT people the same rights as straights are not single events. People like to place them in a historical context. It's common to speak of the Stonewall Riots as the starting point of the world-wide gay liberation movement, even though it actually began with countless smaller events many years earlier. Consider the efforts of Magnus Hirschfeld in Weimar Germany, for one. Liberation is a not a single event, but a long laborious process.

In a number of places around the world they still throw gay people off of roofs. Torture and jail them. Expose them to ridicule. The degree of hostility varies with the degree to which the need arises in sexually insecure people to demonize other people's ways of expressing sexual and emotional feelings.  The gay liberation movement has met with tremendous success around the world. Some thirty countries already grant the right to same-sex couples to marry, and more are added to this list every year. At the same time, at the other end of the spectrum, there are countries - remember Iran's former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hilarious statement: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you we have that."

I bring this up not because it's new information - it's anything but - but because I want to talk about Firebird, a film I came across yesterday which I think deserves recognition as one of these many markers of the progress of the international gay liberation movement. It has been around for a year and made the rounds of 60 LGBT film festivals, and has appeared in some 500 theaters already, but has only now been released on Amazon Prime. Despite its boosters' claims that it's up there with Moonlight and Brokeback Mountain, it's not. It lacks the wallop and the brilliance. But I hope that won't deter you from giving it a chance.

For starters, it's an Estonian movie, and that alone should catch your attention. Actually, it's a British/Estonian co-production which came into being thanks in large part to British actor, Tom Prior, and the Estonian producer and director, Peeter Rebane. Somebody brought to Rebane's attention the story of Sergey Fetisov, an Estonian soldier in the Soviet Army in the late 70s who falls in love with a pilot he is assigned to show around the base. Rebane, gay himself, was carried away by the story and eventually teamed up with Tom Prior to write the screenplay. Rebane would produce and direct; Prior would co-author as well as act the role of Sergey.

It takes time, but they eventually find Ukrainian actor, Oleg Zagorodnii, to play the role of the pilot, and Russian actress, Diana Pozharskaya, to play the role of Luisa, close friend and fellow soldier to Sergey, whom everybody expects he will marry one day. He doesn't, and to say any more is to spoil the plotline.

How well you relate to this movie will depend on how important it is to you that movies be free of "message," a political or other didactic agenda pushing some cause. If you're like most who believe art only suffers when weighed down by some school ma'arm's finger wagging at you, trying to teach you something, this film will be nothing more than a few moments spent with beautiful people and a full-on romantic gay love story - a little flesh - not too much - all pretty run-of-the-mill these days. IndieWire gives it a B-.

If you're like me, though, you will likely appreciate the stunning progress of the Baltic States (I understand that what is happening in Estonia is happening in Latvia and Lithuania as well, if not quite as fast), now free from the chokehold of the Soviet Union and its successor state, Russia, and becoming more like its European neighbors with each passing day. Where once Sergey's dreams included going to Moscow to study acting, these days Estonians are a whole lot closer to their Finnish cousins and neighbors, and other westerners cheering on Ukraine's attempt to break free of Russian clutches. For the record, I have no personal knowledge of whether LGBT people in Estonia still experience greater hostility than in the west because of holdovers from Soviet times, but stepchild adoption became legal in 2016, gender change is recognized by law, and gays, lesbians and bisexuals are allowed to serve openly in the military. Actually, same-sex activity (between consenting males, at least) was decriminalized in Estonia as early as 1929, almost a century ago.

And a gay Estonian can get wind of a memoir about a love story between two Russians stationed in Estonia and make it into a movie non-gay Estonians can incorporate into their cultural heritage.

But I don't want to leave you with the impression that the film is lacking in value except as a polemic for gay liberation. There are moments of genuine passion, times when the tears are real and the fears of being found out are palpable. And the side story - of a sophisticated slightly older cultured man fostering and bringing a kid from the farm into the life of theater and ballet - is a real treat. They actually brought in a ballet troop and choreographed a scene from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite to show the powerful impact of the older (in his 30s - not that old!) gay man on his younger lover. Also fascinating were the Estonian landscapes and the dull Soviet architecture of the time. One scene is even filmed in Moscow.

In the end, the story has the power of all love stories which make us go to extraordinary levels to keep that love alive. In the end, the location is a distraction to what makes the world go around. Besides money, I mean.

photo credit: