It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (23 page)

Being an entrepreneurial soul, Mariano had figured out that if he could somehow get Nigel and me out to Russia, then he could get valuable coverage for
Dark Waters
in a string of influential publications in the UK and US. Between us, Nige and I wrote for
Time Out
,
20/20
,
Fear
,
Fangoria
and
Video Watchdog
, not to mention the radio reports we both now filed
for the BBC. For our part, we’d get exclusive access to a horror-movie set whose location and backstory alone seemed guaranteed to provoke international interest. Even if the movie sucked the set reports would be unusual and therefore newsworthy. And Mariano had promised that at least
some
of the pictures would involve blood, so that would keep the
Fango
-reading gore-hounds happy. Plus, we’d get to have fun in Russia and Ukraine – a particularly big deal for me. For years I’d been parading around wearing the meaningless CCCP insignia (Yuri Gagarin badges, hammer and sickle earrings) which had become boringly fashionable amongst armchair student Trots in the eighties – I’d even started hoarding copies of
Pravda
(which was now being reprinted in English) on the basis that it couldn’t be any more ‘biased’ than the Murdoch press which held Britain in its evil thrall. Yet what I actually
knew
about the former Soviet Union wouldn’t fill the back of a small postage stamp, and here was a chance to gain some invaluable first-hand experience. More importantly, here was an opportunity to start any future political argument with the phrase ‘Well, having actually
worked
in Russia …’ or to pull out the cineaste trump card ‘In my
personal
experience of Soviet film-making in the post-Wall era …’ which I was not about to pass up.

Oh, and the entry stamp would look really cool on my passport.

I was sold.

So, some time later, Nige and I found ourselves at Heathrow airport, boldly setting out on a journey which would take us to Moscow, Odessa, and then on to Feodosiya
on the Black Sea, with impressive Cyrillic screeds duly emblazoned in red ink upon our passports. The first leg of the trip went fabulously well, and we breezed through customs at Moscow airport despite my worries that the border authorities would take one look at us and put us straight on the next plane home. For several weeks I’d been studiously practising a speech which I would deliver in just such an eventuality, reassuring them that I was a bona fide British film journalist who had come here to report upon the glorious state of the glasnost-fuelled Russian film industry while simultaneously humming the chorus of the Internationale and striking an appropriately comradely pose – chin raised, back straight, with perhaps a sheaf of wheat draped over a muscular spanner-wielding forearm. But whoever was hiding behind the scary peaked cap at the customs desk never even looked at me, merely taking my passport and sliding it under an ominous blue light into which he stared for a couple of minutes while tapping away at a hidden keyboard, and then returning it without a word. Apparently I was in.

Hooray!

Nigel similarly went through on the nod, and we proceeded to the arrivals lounge where we were met by a man from the
Dark Waters
entourage whose name I cannot remember, but who I shall refer to as Ivan for reasons of stereotypical simplicity.

My opening gambit was tediously predictable.

‘Hello, I’m Mark, and I need to make a phone call.’

Ivan smiled kindly.’Who do you need to call?’

‘My wife. Linda. I always call her when I get off a plane
just to tell her I’ve arrived safely, and the plane hasn’t crashed and killed everyone on board. You know. Silly really, but it’s sort of a ritual thing and I sort of
have
to do it. Or I can’t relax. So, as I said, I need to use a phone.’

Ivan smiled again.’Linda, is she in Moscow?’

‘Oh, no no, she’s at home in England. Where we live. Linda and me. And I. And I need to call her.’

‘Yes I see,’ said Ivan.’It is not easy to do from the airport. Have you booked?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Have you booked?’

‘No, you don’t understand, I don’t want to travel anywhere, I just want to make a phone call.’

‘To England?’

‘Yes. England.’

‘Have you booked?’

‘No, I don’t want to
go
there, I just want to
phone
there.’

‘Yes. Have you booked?’

This clearly wasn’t working. I wanted to talk about phone calls and Ivan wanted to talk about transport. Either that or he wanted me to book a plane and go straight home. In which case he probably wasn’t the only one.

I decided to try another tack.

‘OK, I
don’t
want to go to England because I just came from there.’

‘Right. And now we go to my house in Moscow where we will get food and whatever else you might need.’

‘Do you have a phone?’

‘Of course I have a phone!’

‘Great. So I can call Linda from there.’

‘Have you booked?’

This was going to be a long trip.

As it turned out it was Ivan (rather than me) who understood the complexities of my predicament. When we arrived at his apartment on the outskirts of Moscow I was duly shown to the phone where I attempted pathetically to make an international phone call. When I asked what the international dialling code was, Ivan laughed sardonically and then tapped a number into the phone which connected me to a sternly unwelcoming operator.

‘
Da!
’

‘Oh, hello. Sorry. Um.
Dosvedanya
! No, wrong word – bother. Er, do you speak English?’

‘
Da
.’

‘Oh, great. I need to make an international call. To England.’

‘England?’

‘Yes.’

‘Phone England?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have booked?’

‘What? What is all this about? Everyone keeps asking me if I’ve
booked
. What does it mean?’

‘It means “you have booked?” Your international phone call. To England. You have booked?’

‘Have I
booked
to make a phone call?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘So, no call. You want to book?’

‘The phone call?’

‘Yes.’

‘To England?’

‘Yes.’

‘Er, yes I suppose so. How long will it take?’

‘Two days.’

‘
Whaaaat?
’

‘Yes, I know. Is fast. Not so busy right now.’

‘Hang on, you’re saying it will take
two days to book a phone call
?’

‘Yes.’

‘But I need to call
now
!’

‘Then you must book.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes, now. And you call in two days.’

My head was reeling. This
couldn’t
be true. Surely it wasn’t possible that a civilised nation which had defeated the Nazis and been the first to put a man in space didn’t have simple international subscriber trunk dialling? But Ivan had been right all along. I really did need to have booked – which I hadn’t.

So much for the glorious revolution.

I now faced a dilemma – the first of many. I had told Linda that I would phone her the instant I arrived in Moscow. I had failed in this endeavour. Worse, there was no chance of
the situation improving in the near future. I couldn’t book a phone call from Ivan’s flat because we were due to ship out of Moscow pretty soon en route to Odessa, after which we would continue on through Ukraine and to the shores of Feodosiya. By the time we got there we would have been travelling for at least three days, on to which I would then have to add the
extra
two days it would take to book a phone call. Assuming, that is, that they
had
a phone in Feodosiya, which seemed uncertain. By the time I finally got word to Linda that I was not dead I would be on my way home, and she would surely have succumbed to grieving. In the movie in my head I could see her (played, as I mentioned earlier, by Julianne Moore) waiting by the phone, a photograph of Jason Isaacs propped on the desk with a solitary rose leaning poignantly against it, her face growing darker and more burdened with worry and anguish by the moment …

Of course, in the ‘real world’ (of which everyone seems so enamoured) none of this was happening at all. Linda (rather than Julianne)
knew
that nothing had happened because there’d been nothing on the news about plane crashes and the like and she just assumed that it was hard to call from Russia. You probably had to book it in advance. But I was now in a state of advancing panic, and
nothing
would calm my agitation. Nothing except …

‘Alcohol. I need alcohol.’

‘Yes,’ said Ivan pleasantly.’We have vodka. You want some?’

‘No, no, no, I can’t do vodka,’ I said feebly.’Particularly not Russian vodka. I’m not that rugged. Do you have beer?’

‘No, but we can get beer. And see Moscow. We have a few hours. We can see the sights. Your train doesn’t leave until 3 a. m.’

‘You mean 3 “p. m. “’

‘No, I mean 3 “a. m. “ Three o’clock in the morning. Tomorrow morning. About twelve hours from now.’ He produced the train tickets and, as always, he was right. Our train was indeed due to pull out of Moscow at 3 a. m. Bloody hell. It was still early afternoon, and the lightly freezing rain outside was starting to abate slightly, unlike my headache. So we headed off into town in search of beer and the ‘sights’.

Out on the streets, Ivan held out his hand to the first passing car which promptly screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. The driver wound down the window and exchanged a few pleasantries with our guide, before opening his back door to let us in.

‘Is it a taxi?’ I asked.’He doesn’t have a sign or anything.’

‘No,’ replied Ivan, nonplussed.

‘He’s a friend of yours?’

‘No. But he will take us to Red Square.’

‘I see. Why?’

‘I thought you wanted to see the sights.’

‘Oh yes I do, but why is
he
taking us? If he’s not a taxi. Or a friend.’

‘We will pay him.’

‘So he
is
a taxi?’

‘No. But we will pay him and he will take us.’

As it turned out, this was how the (non) taxi system
worked in Moscow. If you wanted to get somewhere, and you had some money, you simply flagged down a car.
Any
car. And, for a reasonable remuneration, they might agree to take you to your preferred destination. Sometimes, there would already be other people in the car, perhaps a family with children or elderly relatives. But a mixture of benevolent spirit and earnest entrepreneurism meant that if you had the roubles you could squeeze in with their nearest and dearest and go almost anywhere. Considering the frankly terrible experiences I’ve had with taxis and minicabs in the UK (‘You wanna go
where
mate? At
this
time of day/night/year? You’re
joking
incha?’) it was surprisingly pleasant, if a little unusual.

So roubles changed hands, spaces were found, and off we bumped in an overcrowded Lada (
every
car was a Lada – clichéd but true). We trundled through uniformly drab streets, past endless municipal housing much of which reminded me of my old Hulme flat in Manchester, and on toward the very heart of what used to be the Soviet Union.

After a while we reached Red Square. It was smaller than I had expected. I could see the Kremlin, which looked a bit like Sleeping Beauty’s castle from Disneyland, only without Tinkerbell. But
with
a McDonald’s. That’s glasnost for you. The rain worsened a little, and the wind picked up a touch. I spied the entrance to a subway station. I’d always wanted to see the Moscow Metro which, according to legend, was decorated with striking Soviet murals and offered a beacon of hope to those who still believed in the potential benefits of state-run socialism.

Eager to shelter from the weather we all piled down the subway steps and found ourselves in a cavernous
underground palace, clean as a whistle, spankingly upkept, with the promised artwork gleaming from every wall. It was magnificent. A train howled proudly out of the tunnel and into the station where Muscovites proceeded to board and disembark in polite and orderly fashion. I thought of the horrors of London’s Northern Line; of being crammed up against jostling bullying louts between Archway and Tottenham Court Road, of endless delays and signal failures, of ripped posters advertising lousy movies and noxious anti-dandruff products, and of illiterate graffiti forcefully inviting me to ‘suk thiz’. I thought of being propositioned by a paedophile at Lancaster Gate on the way home from a shopping trip at the age of eleven, and of Paul Weller getting stuck ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ and getting beaten up by Nazis who ‘smelled of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many right-wing meetings’. And suddenly the absurd romance of my dreams of Mother Russia came flooding back to me and I was filled with an overwhelming love of Lenin and a powerful desire to defect to the East and spend the rest of my days watching
Battleship Potemkin
. We were, after all, headed for Odessa …

After a while we trudged back up the steps and on to the Moscow streets, cold and wet and tired, and headed back toward the suburbs of Moscow. Here we met Yolena, who would be our translator, guide, and (as would become apparent) guardian angel during the descent into hell upon which we were unknowingly about to embark. Yolena was a student in her early twenties; bright, intelligent, fluent in many languages, solid of character and sunny of disposition.
She had agreed to give up a week of her life in order to chaperone a pair of shabby moaning Brits around her country for almost no pay (but rather for ‘the experience’) and frankly we did not deserve her. But as yet we hadn’t realised just how far out of our depths we had drifted nor just how different things were going to be now that we weren’t in Kansas any more.

Yolena took us to her sister’s flat, stopping to pick up some misshapen bottles of what claimed to be ‘beer’ from a ‘licensed’ vendor on an anonymous street corner. Here we were fed and pampered by our hosts whose hospitality seemed boundless. You can say what you like about the Russian state, about its crap economy and rampant corruption (more of which later) and about the stunning inequality between the rich and poor in an allegedly socialist society, but somehow none of that political venality seemed to have brushed off on the Russian people themselves. They were absolutely lovely.