Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends begins with a doomy portent: “The world you are about to see no longer exists; none of us knew what was about to happen.” A parodic tease, no? Something designed to prep us for a science fiction thriller? Alas, it’s the truth. The film, lasting five and a half hours and subtitled Last Air in Moscow, is a work of slow horror. It documents an extinction event: the state-sanctioned destruction of TV Rain, the last remaining independent news channel in modern Russia.
TV Rain was founded in 2010 by two women: Natalya Sindeyeva and Vera Krichevskaya. It offered an antidote to the stuffed-shirt bromides and Putin-appeasing mendacities of more established news programmes. It was young, peppy, well placed to cover the anti-corruption protests flaring up across the country and the rise of opposition leaders such as Alexei Navalny. Soon, inevitably, it was accused of spreading untruths and being unpatriotic.
By autumn 2021, when My Undesirable Friends begins, the broadcasting climate, like the political climate, has become much chillier still. Navalny is in jail and independent media outlets shut down. Memorial, a human rights organisation set up to study human rights crimes under Stalin, is about to be dissolved. The fiancé of a TV Rain journalist is behind bars on trumped-up charges.
Most damagingly, the Ministry of Justice has saddled the channel with the label “foreign agents”. This makes it hard for them to raise funds or advertising revenue. Staff, subject to exhausting audits, have to itemise expenses such as pet food. News anchors who forget to remind viewers that the guests they’re interviewing have also been declared “foreign agents” are hit with costly fines.
Time—jittery, sped-up, fear-inducing—hangs heavy in every scene. Loktev captures these impertinent journalists in the intense now, as they chase contacts, rush to meet deadlines, wait nervously to find out if their station has a future. They think about the past and what could have been differently. Says one, “For 20 years, a monster was growing in front of our eyes whom we all fed with our silence and our passivity.” They peer into the future—both hopefully (“One day there’ll come a time when we won’t feel like town crazies”) and nervously (“Things will definitely get worse”).
‘What will I show my future children? That I posted fucking Instagram Stories?’
Citizen Kane, The Parallax View, Good Night, and Good Luck: journalists on the big screen tend to be men. In My Undesirable Friends, they are almost all women. Extraordinary women—brave, witty, soulful. Loktev shows them vaping furiously, comparing Russia’s need to cast off Putin with Britney Spears’s struggle to free herself from a conservatorship, knocking back booze in modest kitchens. Government officials patronise them as “young ladies”. They talk about growing up in a patriarchy, a nation that tolerates high levels of domestic violence, a reactionary culture that disdains not just women but the disabled, the homeless, the queer. They report the news, but also join protests: “What will I show my future children?” explains one. “That I posted fucking Instagram stories?”
Loktev, who was born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States when she was nine, has long been one of America’s most daring independent filmmakers. Her debut, Moment of Impact (1998), dealt with the aftermath of a car accident that left her father in a state of limbo and her mother, forced to attend to him hand and foot, almost as stricken. She’s a contemporary Chantal Akerman: forensic to the point of being aloof, every shot tightly composed, alert to the power that women have or don’t have over their bodies.
But My Undesirable Friends, shot on a smartphone, is less detached. She’s captivated by the journalists and they trust her. For long stretches, in spite of the mayhem, they all seem equally “vaccinated by adrenaline”. There’s a darkly funny moment towards the end when a doomscrolling TV Rain worker announces, “The US Embassy in Moscow advises all US citizens to immediately leave Russia while civilian air travel is still available.” “Shit!” exclaims Loktev. “That’s me!”
Structured in five parts, the film is full of zingers you might find in a buzzy TV series. Admits one acerbic journo, “I watched Harry Potter as a kid and couldn’t understand why so many people can’t overthrow one bald guy who’s been ruling for 20 years. Now I get it.” The outbreak of “military special operations” in Ukraine—official cant for war—kills the station: almost every TV Rain employee who can heads to the airport.
Loktev is currently editing the second half of the film. It’s entitled Exile. I can’t wait to see it. I also dread the thought of seeing it.
