Alexander Gorchilin’s Acid (2018): Putin-Friendly Arthouse

My point here isn’t to suggest that Gorchilin and Pecheykin are government lackeys bent on pleasing Vladimir Putin. They’re young filmmakers working in a totalitarian country and have constraints that their counterparts in the US can’t even begin to imagine. And I should also note that Acid is a very good film. It’s engaging, well acted, and well shot. Gorchilin’s got obvious talent, and I’ll go out of my way to see what he comes out with next. But the film’s symbolism is simply too in-your-face to be ignored, and a bit of ambiguity in its final scenes would have gone a long way toward alleviating its propagandistic aftertaste.

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In the opening scene of Acid, Russian actor Alexander Gorchilin’s directorial debut, two young men in their early twenties arrive at the apartment of a friend, Ivan, who’s in the midst of a horrific acid trip and clinging completely nude to a dislodged toilet he’s dragged into the living room. The two sober friends, Sasha and Petya, make some progress in calming Ivan down and then settle in to wait for his trip to end. But their lowered vigilance has tragic consequences. While Petya’s smoking a cigarette on one of the apartment’s balconies, Ivan emerges onto a neighboring balcony from a room he’s isolated himself in and climbs over the railing. Ivan and Petya look at each other an instant before the latter says, “If you want to jump, then jump.” Ivan duly does so, and the scene that follows is his funeral.

Though it doesn’t become clear until much later in the film, Petya’s utterance is the original sin at the heart of Acid, the driving force that leads Petya and Sasha down two divergent paths and ties together the film’s symbology. Acid made the rounds of international film festivals in 2018 but didn’t garner enough attention to receive an analysis of its symbols and themes and how these relate to contemporary Russian politics and society. The results of such a critique will come, I think, as a surprise. For a film that explores drugs, homosexuality, and artistic ambition, the ultimate message delivered by Acid is astonishingly conservative – and not simply conservative in the way an American would conceive of the term, but conservative in a manner that reflects a vision of Russia that’s been publicly and repeatedly espoused by Vladimir Putin.

After Ivan’s funeral, Petya and Sasha go to a nightclub where Sasha, who for reasons that are never explained has recently circumcised himself, attracts the attention of Vasilisk, an artist who hopes to photograph his penis. They end up going somewhat reluctantly to Vasilisk’s studio along with several girls, and Vasilisk, after getting his coveted photo, shows them his signature artistic technique. This consists of disfiguring statuettes of “revolutionary heroes” by dipping them into a bath of acid, the second direct reference to the film’s title. After Vasilisk’s demonstration, Petya and the artist have an orgy with the girls while Sasha isolates himself to smoke cigarettes.

Petya’s the first to wake up the next morning and – after watching it spin around on a record player – drinks from a bottle of Vasilisk’s acid. He spits it out, but we don’t see the immediate aftermath of his seemingly odd decision. When Sasha later comes to pick him up from the hospital, Petya’s either unable or unwilling to speak and has a bandaged mouth; he hasn’t, however, suffered any permanent damage. In the meantime, Sasha’s mom has unexpectedly returned from Asia, and we learn that Petya and Sasha, along with Sasha’s grandmother, have been living together in her apartment. Petya, who seems to be no fan of Sasha’s mom but doesn’t want to go back to living with his own mother, suddenly finds himself not only recovering from a self-inflicted injury but homeless. His solution is to return to Vasilisk’s studio. The artist is at first uncomfortable with the situation, but Petya refuses to leave. Soon after, Vasilisk breaks up with his boyfriend – the first explicit reference to his homosexuality – and becomes suddenly accepting, even grateful, of Petya’s presence.

The next crucial plot point comes when Petya goes to a police station and, at last deciding to speak again, tells an officer outside the station that he’s killed someone. They go into the station together, and Petya’s fate remains unclear for most of the movie’s remainder. The story’s focus then turns exclusively to Sasha, and a number of events occur that ultimately have little bearing on the film’s outcome – Sasha sleeps with his girlfriend’s 15-year-old sister, he contacts Petya’s estranged father to see if he can help with Petya’s legal situation, he argues with his mom. And, more relevant to the film’s symbolic weave, we learn more about Sasha’s musical ambitions as well as the low opinion people hold of his talents.

By this point in Acid, it’s not at all clear what Gorchilin or screenwriter Valery Pecheykin are aiming to say. The film’s final 15 minutes, however, provide a whopping dose of clarity.

After hitting his girlfriend’s father – who’s come to confront him about having slept with his younger daughter – in the parking lot of his apartment building, Sasha runs nearly weeping into his room, where, outside his window, he finds Petya waiting for him. Petya comes in, and the two of them begin a conversation about the – as Petya sees it – empty, dissolute, iPhone-obsessed life they’ve been leading. It’s clear who’s in control of the conversation: Petya speaks calmly, almost authoritatively, while Sasha’s beside himself with a mixture of anger and surprise. Sasha’s music gets brought up, and Petya promises to take a greater interest it. He also announces that Vasilisk’s had a baby and asked him to be the godfather. The baptism’s the next day.

This is where a bit of knowledge regarding Putin and his policies becomes necessary for interpreting the story. To begin with, one needs to understand Putin’s stance towards the Orthodox Church, which he’s heavily supported throughout his time in power and held up as an example of Russian exceptionalism. As Max Seddon put it in an article for The Financial Times, Putin “has used religion to highlight divisions between Russia and the supposedly amoral west, and to elevate the idea of the ‘Russian world,’ a sort of spiritual dominion bringing together Russian-speaking former Soviet citizens, that has been promoted by the church and the state.”

This nexus between state and church in Russia is key to interpreting what can only be called Petya’s redemption. He’s repented and, we can assume since he’s not in jail, been absolved. The life he’d been leading – the life he disparages in his conversation with Sasha and the life in which he told Ivan to jump – has been left behind, with approval from the government. Having received the state’s permission to act as a free member of society again, Petya now turns to the church, or, more appropriately, the Church.

It’s telling that Petya took his guilt to the state rather than the church. While both may be moral authorities, in a contest between the two the state comes out on top – which is, of course, exactly how Putin would want it.

Also indispensable to understanding Acid’s denouement is Putin’s elevation of “traditional” family values. One piece of this is Putin’s homophobic polices, the most notorious of which is what’s come to be known as the “gay propaganda law,” a policy that seeks to limit the public’s – and more specifically children’s – exposure to depictions of homosexuality in various media. To take one recent example, the law provoked controversy when scenes from Rocketman were cut from the film’s Russian release.

Tangential to his homophobic policies has been an emphasis by Putin on the importance of procreation, a policy that has led to financial incentives for having a second and third child as well as the Order of Parental Glory, an award presented by Putin himself to parents who have seven or more children. Putin’s encouragement to produce families is part of a campaign against real problems brought about by Russia’s shrinking population, but it also has more conspiratorial undertones. In his book The Road to Unfreedom, historian Timothy Snyder links state stigmatization of homosexuality and state fetishism of large families by quoting from a 2013 speech in which Putin “associated gay rights with a Western model that ‘opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.’”

Vasilisk, the gay, eccentric artist, turns out to be not only a father but a religious one who wants to have his son baptized by the Church. And it’s none other than this gay artist-turned-religious father who’s helping to bring the now clear-sighted Petya back to God. Beyond Vasilisk’s homosexuality, the nature of Petya and Sasha’s relationship is brought into question by several characters throughout Acid, and at one point Sasha’s mom explicitly mentions her suspicions of homosexuality. While the viewer is able, for several reasons, to assume that nothing sexual has happened between Petya and Sasha, the future possibility of it lingers over much of the story. But with Petya’s disavowal of their previous lifestyle and his decision to be the godfather of Vasilisk’s baby, we get – on top of Vasilisk’s transformation into a family man – Petya’s implicit rejection of any possible “non-traditional” relationship between himself and Sasha.

The morning after Petya’s visit to Sasha – and after an enigmatic dream sequence that takes place in a field and features multiple apparitions of Ivan, a baby dancing on a toilet, and a fireworks display – we find Sasha sitting despondently in front of his computer, listening to a voice message from Petya informing Sasha that he’s not a real musician and that all of his music has been deleted. Seeming to have accepted Petya’s verdict, Sasha picks up a bottle of acid he took from Vasilisk’s studio and looks it over while contemplating what to do with himself. In the next scene, Sasha’s in a church examining the bowl of holy water where Vasilisk’s son will be baptized. After confirming with a priest that the baby will indeed be dipped into the bowl, he’s left alone and empties the bottle into the holy water. Petya and Vasilisk soon arrive with the baby, and Sasha goes outside the room to wait for the baptism to take place.

An understanding of Putin’s rehabilitation of the Soviet Union is helpful in piecing together Acid’s beginning and end. Turning again to Timothy Snyder – always a good source when trying to understand contemporary Russia – in The Road to Unfreedom the historian explains that in the early 2010s Putin began to promulgate the idea that throughout Russia’s history all of its problems have come from abroad, an argument that can be seen in his above-mentioned quote on gay rights. This meant that every aspect of Russia’s domestic past had to be viewed positively, including, in a glaring contradiction, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union that replaced it. Snyder argues that Putin, influenced by various nationalistic political thinkers, used this as a tactic to legitimize to the Russian people his own illegitimate means of prolonging his time in power. Putin’s plan seems to have worked: Asked in a 2017 poll to name “the ten most outstanding people of all time and of all nations,” Russians cited Stalin more than anyone else. (Putin, in a tie with Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, came in second.)

With this in mind, we can return to the film’s beginning, when Vasilisk shows Petya and Sasha his method of dipping statuettes of revolutionary – that is, Soviet, – heroes into a tub of acid. In that scene, we have a gay artist destroying Soviet heroes; in the baptism scene, we have a God-fearing father christening his newborn child. Like Petya, Vasilisk’s been redeemed. But Sasha, the unsaved musician, has decided that the baby, like the statuettes, should be mutilated. Just as Vasilisk’s former self committed heresy against Russia’s Soviet past, Sasha is now committing heresy against another one of Putin’s propaganda tools – the family.

As the baby is being lowered toward the holy water, Sasha jumps up and runs into the room, overturning the bowl just in time. He starts towards the church’s exit as the others question his sanity, and we then come to the film’s final shot: Sasha, aimless and distraught, walks alone on an empty highway and, as if unable to give up on his dreams of being a musician, begins to blow pathetically over the top of the empty bottle of acid, creating an occasional broken note.

The message is starkly clear: The pursuit of music, of art, leads nowhere; fatherhood and the Church, on the other hand, give life an anchor and purpose. And as if to underscore the point, before the credits begin to roll, there’s a dedication: “For Mothers and Fathers.”

My point here isn’t to suggest that Gorchilin and Pecheykin are government lackeys bent on pleasing Vladimir Putin. They’re young filmmakers working in a totalitarian country and have constraints that their counterparts in the US can’t even begin to imagine. And I should also note that Acid is a very good film. It’s engaging, well acted, and well shot. Gorchilin’s got obvious talent, and I’ll go out of my way to see what he comes out with next. But the film’s symbolism is simply too in-your-face to be ignored, and a bit of ambiguity in its final scenes would have gone a long way toward alleviating its propagandistic aftertaste.

I think Gorchilin is aware of all this. When asked in an interview about the film’s dedication, he responded that it’s meant to be ironic without really explaining where the irony lies. Given the film’s final scenes and his choice to put the dedication at the end rather than the beginning, it seems to be entirely sincere. In any case, an artist’s intentions and statements matter much less than the ideas evidenced in what they produce. And in the case of Acid, what’s been produced can be aptly tagged as Putin-friendly arthouse.

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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film’s DVD or Blu-ray.