Andrew Chapman, Dartmouth College

Dmitrii Fiks’s 2012 film The White Moor, or Intimate Stories about My Neighbors presents an upper middle class not comfortable in its own skin. Despite living in modern Moscow, with all of the cushy amenities of Russia’s new found stability in the 2000s, everyone in The White Moor is role-playing, putting on a mask on how to live as a decent person, a proper, good-intentioned representative of the middle class. They act out the roles they are supposed to play in society, yet their intimate lives are rife with problems, deception, and violence. Fiks’s film is constructed around three men, and while each differs from the next on levels ranging from their professions to their sexual orientations, their intimate relationships with their wives and mistresses are equally defined and constrained by normative, middle class values.

Lenia, a closeted homosexual who has relations with men while on business trips, is pressured by his wife Vika to have another child. During a humorous sex scene, their inability to conceive is encapsulated by Vika’s chastisement, “Don’t put it there!” («Не туда!»). Lenia’s desire for anal sex with his wife is clearly shown as the wrong way to have intimate relations in that it will not produce a child. Lenia’s failure to conceive, as well as his craving for what is shown in the film as a homosexual act, is a strike against his masculinity. Vika’s mother eventually plays matchmaker, finding a more suitable mate for Vika, and in another absurd sex scene, she is impregnated in a chicken coop, emerging with fresh eggs, having completed the biologically proper act.

Yet Vika remains with Lenia, and both mother and daughter are in on the ploy to convince Lenia that the child is his. Just as Lenia has acted the role of a straight man throughout the film, Vika is willing to keep up appearances in order to build the seemingly “perfect” middle class family. Lenia’s willingness to submit to the heteronormative structures of society, in this case a matriarchal family, does not find him happiness. While Lenia takes the brunt of Fiks’s comic relief, the other characters, who act out a more stereotypical masculinity, also fail. All of the men in the film are ineffectual, or impotent in one way or another. They all have achieved success within the male-male social world, but they are ruled by their scheming wives or mistresses.

What exactly does Fiks’s film say about men in Russia’s emerging middle class? Men can parade around their masculinity, just like President Putin’s bare-chested, public displays, but this is a charade. Masculinity is just another showpiece with little real value, and it is subsumed within the female gendered construct of the nation, or in Fiks’s film, female run households.

Class and family stability require men to cast off their true identities in order to parade as family patriarchs and men of the household, something they are not equipped to do. The main complaint about men in middle class Russia for Fiks, is that while they can act out roles, they lack the ability to truly feel. Fiks’s “enacted” era of stability and conformity harks back to another Soviet period. During the Brezhnev era, social pressures forced people to role-play in public space, while maintaining private lives, but something different is going on here. Social pressure works toward constructing a homogenous middle class, but it is coming from within the household.

June 2013