You I love

Well, I bet only Le duc has seen this movie.
How did I pick it? Pure case, let's be fair, it has to do with the video shop that never has anything I want on loan, so here it is.
You I love, the first openly gay russian movie.
Totally contort, strange, but I liked it, probably because this is how I'd like to live my life, just the other way round.

A lunchtime pick-pocketing incident brings together Timofei, a spindly-limbed Moscow advertising geek, and Vera, slick and sexy anchorwoman for a TV news show. Both suffer from a certain spiritual hollowness in their roles as vanguard of Russia's head-forward lunge into capitalism. Their sex life also seems to have been eroded by the politico-economic reality ( a connection made explicit in a reference to a friend whose "virility depends on the value of the dollar").

Thus in each other the two find a perfect match. Vera even has in Timofei a partner who understands her attempts to fill the void through her addiction to food. Their passionate relationship is just about to reach the one-year mark when Uloomji, a Kalmyk lad who overcame homelessness by finding a job at the zoo feeding reindeer, falls onto Timofei's car.

Rattled by the state of the semi-conscious stranger, Timofei drives the victim back to his (Timofei's) sumptuous flat. Vera is not amused at the newcomer, and even less so when she finds the pair of them sleeping in an embrace. She takes this as an assault on her feminine power, a feeling intensified by her own doubts about her position as public face for her TV station.

Slowly, though, she starts to come to terms with her partner's bisexuality, even taking him to a gay romp and engaging in a steamy threesome with a stranger (overheard by a bemused Uloomji via a mobile phone). More than just revealing hidden sexual tendencies, Uloomji brings to the couple something of the spiritual side that they missed, and even provides the inspiration for a particularly successful poster campaign for Timofei.

But Uloomji's family are less than amused, and a struggle starts for control of the boy's life.

Vera's physical sexuality is highly stylised: one scene has her dressed in lingerie revelling in her body as she pretends, for the sake of shock value, to have just had a sex change, while in another we see a subjective nightmare of her own low self-esteem as we see her presenting the news naked.

A miniature bust of Tchaikovsky (Russia's most famous gay personality) rolling around on the floor while the composer's music blasts out of the stereo.




And they never change the sheets for the whole movie...