"Intergirl". A film that destroys morality
The explosive, socially taboo issues over the past 70 years were covered by the best Soviet film talent and had a much more destructive impact on people than the broadcast of the Moscow putsch two years later …
Frosty January 1989. Kilometer-long lines wind in Moscow cinemas - the Soviet public on a scale unprecedented for this decade is in a hurry to get to the premiere of the "piquant" film. The main heroine of the film and the future role model for a whole generation of young Soviet girls - the intergirl, playfully looks up from the poster.
"In our state, prostitution as a social phenomenon is completely absent"
For the first time, for the 286-million Soviet people, brought up in the domestic film distribution and trusting them more than themselves, the "forbidden" theme of sex, which "does not exist in the country," and those who sell it were shown. The explosive, socially taboo issue over the past 70 years has been covered by the best Soviet film talent and has had a much more destructive impact on people than the broadcast of the Moscow putsch two years later. The system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan helps to understand how and why this happened.
Intergirl is a product
When the Soviet writer of the war years, laureate of the State Prize and the Lenin Komsomol Prize, Vladimir Kunin was visiting Warsaw, Polish prostitutes in the hotel so often caught his eye that he decided to write a story about them. Returning to Leningrad, he asked to go to the 4th department of the criminal investigation department, with whose employees he followed the lives of local prostitutes working in the Primorskaya hotel.
This experience formed the basis of the story "Freken Tanka", which quickly spread among the Soviet reader after being published in the most popular literary magazine "Aurora". Kunin himself considered this story very mediocre, but the declared theme caused an unprecedented excitement, dividing the reading audience (and it was the maximum in the USSR compared to other countries) by half: some were delighted with the new "perestroika theme", while others wanted to give the author to court.
The published story was so well known that its adaptation would most likely be a success. This is what the wife of the famous Soviet director Pyotr Todorovsky Mir thought about. "Intergirl is a product!" - flashed through the woman's head, and the entrepreneurial vein in her was already calculating the possible success after several years of her husband's creative lull. It was she, with the persuasiveness characteristic of the oral vector, who began to persuade a serious military director, who devoted his art to the study of Man, to make a film about a prostitute. “It was funny,” but she succeeded. Mira drove her husband to hotels, showing intergirl prostitutes, looking for funding opportunities, going through all Moschino instances and persuading her husband to announce the future film in an interview. So, due to temporary material difficulties,Todorovsky's wife was looking for a new realization for herself in the production business.
Pyotr Todorovsky, a well-known cameraman and director of thoughtful cinema with a sense, winner of the Oscar for the film "A Field-of-War", who never saw prostitutes "live", resisted for a long time. Until the end of his life, he believed that he was "obliged" to make this film. The choice on him, as the director of the screen version of the sensational story, also fell on the part of the Central Committee, where they understood that he was able to remove not pornography, but the lyrical side of the plot. The very fact that in a country where for more than half a century the information presented to the population has been rechecked and subjected to strict censorship for the sake of raising morality, cultivating humanistic values, and rallying peoples, such a film adaptation is suddenly allowed - a wake-up call. And he began to call from the time when the country's leadership began to listen to the "voices from across the ocean."
"Am I a woman or where?"
To himself, Todorovsky, the owner of the anal-sound bunch of vectors, explained his work as follows: "I was shooting a movie not about a confused, but about a woman who could not be realized in those Soviet times!" Was it really so? After all, the type of skin-visual woman in a state of war, shown in the film, by Tanya Zaitseva, actually had a lot of opportunities for implementation in Soviet times.
According to Yuri Burlan's System-Vector Psychology, it was they, free skin-visual women, who inspired revolutionary achievements, over several years implemented a program to eliminate the illiteracy of the population, and were the first to reach common working boundaries with men. The orderlies fearlessly rescued the wounded during the war, and then created that very unique elite Soviet culture. Todorovsky filmed about them.
Lyuba from his "Military Field Novel", Rita from "The Beloved Woman of Mechanic Gavrilov" - all these are collective images of a sensual, amorous and emotional skin-visual woman. This is exactly how the director imagined "Intergirl", choosing an actress for the main role "to her liking, not according to her figure." Unconsciously choosing the actress Elena Yakovleva with precision, the director showed an emotional, emotional and well-developed nurse who, by the will of fate, found herself in the rooms of the Primorskaya Hotel.
But the form turned out to be clearer than the essence, and the viewer saw not at all an unhappy woman who was gaining material support for herself in the difficult conditions of perestroika. In the very first year of the showing of the film "Intergirl" 41 million Soviet citizens received a distorted view of the new collective future, of the wealth, freedom and ease of life of a foreign exchange prostitute, for society, hiding behind the status of a nurse, right in cinemas.
Intergirl: "Kisul, and I want to ask you: does your diploma from the Institute of Culture help you in bed with your partner?"
At first, the viewer despising Tanya with a grin "spies" the unusual for the Soviet present life of a representative of the "ancient profession." Hotel rooms, service for foreign delegations and regular searches by the police are just little things in life compared to the amounts that an intergirl can get for a night. In contrast to “shop assistants”, Tanya does not buy cars and university diplomas. She buys a fur coat for her mother and tries to secure her future, occasionally pampering herself with new clothes.
Tanya Zaitseva helps those who are worse off than her, taking part in the life of a neighbor, taking care of those who nevertheless ended up in the police after another raid. She is a kind and caring nurse who knows her job. Tanya does not profit from her neighbor, like the archetypal skin women around her.
Tanya Zaitseva is not confused, she just dreams of a good life, she found her “good way” to become Frau Larsson and live brightly abroad. And it seems that she is not to blame for this … Hundreds of thousands of Russian students, teachers, young mothers who, due to material difficulties in the 1990s, decided to sell their bodies as a new "heroine of labor", shown by the leader of the film distribution, will think so, remembering her image …
"The test of satiety is sometimes more difficult than the test of poverty"
Pyotr Todorovsky
Since that time, girls more and more often did not choose the profession of a doctor or a kindergarten teacher. Why spend years studying, if then you don't get a living wage? After all, you can, like Tanya Zaitseva, making good money, finally get into a well-fed and happy “abroad”. And no matter how hard the director tried to show all the impossibility of living happily in a country alien to the Russian people, where by the standards of the Western skin mentality he will always be "second class", the image of a new car, full of a cart in a supermarket and a "star" arrangement. In fact, life in Sweden has turned into a hopeless longing for the homeland, borne only by the hope of returning home at least for a while. The hope that turned into death …
Currency prostitute - the new hero of our time
Over the course of two episodes of the film, the intergirl Tanya becomes very close to the viewer: together with her, we feel the bitterness of our father's betrayal and his duplicity. It hurts for her mother, who, like many Soviet women, agrees to everything, if only the child was good. She is ashamed of the mercantile Swede groom recounting the bill in the restaurant. The tense climax of the film, filled with visual premonitions, tears and anxiety is transmitted from the screen so clearly that Tanya, the currency "Petersburg whore" evokes very strong sympathy. How can you not understand the despair of a woman rushing home in tears and covering herself with her hands from the impending disaster? This keen compassion, evoked by Todorovsky's skilful directorial intention, sharply reduced the distance between the Soviet man and the "ancient profession" despised in society.
Prostitution as an indicator of the underdevelopment of mental qualities in a small number of people is present in any society. As well as its surge during strong social deformations, such as war, the collapse of the political system, etc. But building this into a colorful myth for a huge nation is by no means a natural process.
“Why go to Hamburg? They say that Russian girls are in vogue there now."
The substitution of a banal prostitute for the image of the dramatic heroine was not in vain for the Soviet audience. "Intergirl" became "a classic of the new cinema", in which prostitution became the lot of female happiness. This theme was cultivated from the screen so roughly and directly that in a very short period of time the morality of which the woman is the carrier turned into its opposite.
It was a time when many women easily and early entered into relationships for the purpose of "benefit-benefit", agreed to any form of exploitation in order to go abroad ("American fight, I will leave with you …"). Cultural values began to be considered the lot of the "poor scoop", and monetary relations became the measure of everything. Thus, the society with the highest percentage of innocent girls getting married in the last twenty years has gained popularity in a matter of years as a "cheap sexual force" that supplies girls to brothels in a dozen countries.
At the same time, women went for it deliberately, not so much because of social restrictions at home, but because of the romanticization of life "over the hill", not even bothering to look for other ways of realization. Skin-visual women, whose role was to develop culture and art, instead lived like intergirls, often reaching the finale shown in the film.
Intergirl: "Abroad will help us"
Like any scandalous film, one way or another discrediting the values of the communist state, the film "Intergirl" was sponsored from abroad. Mira Todorovskaya managed to find funds to finance the film, for which Moschino did not plan a dime, in Sweden through an acquaintance she met by chance.
"Intergirl" was the first commercial film, which was shot on the expensive for those times "Kodak" film. There was no need to save it, so the shooting was completed in three months. The sponsor of the film was a Swedish farmer who soon found himself in jail for tax evasion on the profits owed for the film and sold the rights to the film to an outside agency. The version of the film, shot for the Swedish side, was cut and had a different ending, which dramatically changed the idea of the film. In Europe, this version of the film was not successful, while the Russian one received awards and prizes outside the USSR.
"Intergirl" is by right a tragic film, the appearance of which turned out to be in line with the general destruction of the economy, ideology, and life in the country. Many values and achievements were buried under the collapsed state, which cost our people in due time a lot of strength and lives. And, despite the director's good intentions, the film did its best to contribute to this destruction. A disoriented society that trusts the media like no other in the world has only empirically managed to understand the absurdity of such a path - without morality and purpose. Only today has it finally moved away from the intoxication of propaganda and is ready to independently build its new future. Therefore, today, as never before, it is very important to deeply and as accurately as possible recognize and evaluate everything that happens in society, including the meanings of films, regardless of whetherwhen they hit country screens. If you want to learn more about a systematic approach to the analysis of films, notable public events and other important processes taking place in the modern world, register for free online lectures on System-Vector Psychology by Yuri Burlan at the link:
