Vera (Lyubov Tolkalina), a glamourous TV anchorwoman with an addiction to food, and Timofei (Evgeny Koryakovsky), a jaded creative at an advertising company, meet at a restaurant after Vera's purse gets snatched. They begin a happy affair but about a year later, Uloomji (Damir Badmaev), a rural boy who tends deer at the zoo, enters the scene when he steps in front of Timofei's moving car, and Timofei takes him home to recover. Uloomji's Mongolian table manners gross Vera out (though little-miss eating disorder should be the last to raise an eyebrow in that direction) but his smoky charisma and earthy Buddhist sparkle seem to be just what Timofei has been looking for. Uloomji is gay, and Timofei is latently so. The two guys begin a tentative, sweet affair, at which point Vera's breezy insecurities instantly upscale to gale force.

You I Love has been touted as the first Russian gay film, but it is actually eighty years too late to claim this title, as all those lingering shots of muscular sailors' bare backs and shoulders in (gay director) Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin were filmed in 1925. Certainly, though, it is a particularly modern and sassy film with all kinds of whiz-bang camera work and a sexy cast and one made very much in the girl meets boy, who then meets boy Gen -X romantic comedy template which we don't normally associate with modern Russian cinema.

Unfortunately, this lovely film is probably a tad too earnest, and terribly structured. Though You I Love glimmers with real beauty and heart, and has numerous good points, it's undone by a bunch of glaring errors. In the style of a churned-out gay late-1990s snot rag such as All Over The Guy, the script seems to be a bit of a slush draft, with its themes and characters nascent and worth developing, but not sufficiently devoloped to have someone call "Action!" on the set. As a result, characters are like human-shaped objects covered in Post-It notes, which in the rush to get the movie prematurely filmed, keep falling off, and being replaced by new ones and themes and storylines act like sedated mad cows.

For example, someone forgot that in the first act, Vera had an addiction to food. Vera's constant need to eat is her calling card in her film's first few scenes, we even see her wolfing down a hamburger between commercial breaks during a newscast, but twenty minutes into the movie, then we don't hear another thing about it, or see her consume nary a morsel again. Her tears and occasional angry walks into Timofei's apartment show her despair and confusion over the situation with Uloomji, but that's about as far as it goes. We need more information here on how and why an intelligent, successful woman would handle her boyfriend falling for another guy. The movie's coda has Vera reduced to a walking question mark - we haven't a clue who she is, what decisions she's made or how she's made them. She is a potentially interesting character who is played well by the talented Tolkalina, but she is so underdeveloped she would have been better off out of the film altogether, in my opinion. Use it, or lose it.

Additionally, the film's ideology skids like a runaway sled on downsloping, bumpy wet ice. We are shown how Russia is gorging itself to cultural death on capitalism, but at the same time, shown how capitalism gives us things like budget, boutique airlines which allow peasant-stock people like Uloomji the opportunity to travel internationally on affordable, repeat trips, an educational and expansive experience that was once the exclusive privelege of the aristocratic super-rich. The central gay love affair is approached calmly, and with tender sexiness, but then we have to suffer a scene where a shocked Timofei is cruised by an over-acting flaming traffic cop, and later to a pair of overweight corrupt gay Senators who imply that anyone secretly gay can gain power through what appears to be some vodka-sodden Russian gay government mafia. The stress placed on both women and men to look their best using whatever increasingly bizarre techniques necessary is introduced, but undermined by the beauty of the cast - Uloomji isn't some fat, wart-covered animal tender, he's an absolutely stunning looking person whose flawless physical perfection is what drives most of the rest of us to hit the gym or reach for the botox. Why cast a pack of hotties then argue a mini-thesis about the evils of surface beauty?

However, the film's use of colour and design is entrancing. Timofei's green-apple bed linen, used at one point as a breakfast robe and in competition with his collection of sumptuous fur rugs, is so striking it's used as the poster cover-art, and the framing of Uloomji in his final scene is reminiscent of the work of Pierre et Gilles. Badmaev and Koryakovsky play their romance convincingly, with the former's unhewed passions and the latter's Jude Law-ish charms sparking a very warm glow.

Related Reading:
Making Love
Sunday, Bloody Sunday