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Hero Worship and Movies about Russian Nationalists

 




Above is the first image I saw from the new Limonov movie. 20 year old me would have been losing his mind over this but (slightly) older me is unsure. It is exciting that it's being made, the first film about his whole life (the Russian made Rosskoe was focused on a young Limonov) BUT:

It's not just an adaptation of his life story but of the Carrere book. The fact that it took a book by a French bourgeois memoirist  to get a major movie about Limonov made is ludicrous. Someone should have made one years ago, hell, someone should have done a whole series of them years ago,  one for each of his major phases that a good film maker could create a complete aesthetic universe out of. You'd have Limonov the thief/poet in muddy and drab provincial Ukraine, Limonov roving through Moscow and partying with underground poets, the down and out punk years in violent 70's NYC (plus the fun challenge of casting Richard Hell and the Ramones), his time in Paris with the intellectuals gathered around L' Idiot international, and then the morphing into a Russian nationalist in the 90's (more fun challenges: casting Dugin and Arkan and deciding how much of a war movie to make it).


I was obsessed with Limonov in high school when I looked him up after reading his name in Dugin's statement about leaving the NBP, which I found after searching for the phrase "National Bolshevism" after reading it in a Stalin biography (I was a weird kid). This led to a more serious interest in Russian nationalism in college and grad school and eventually to moving to Russia for a short time, so this strange man from Eastern Europe helped me start on an odd life path. So for that soft sentimental reason I want the movie to be good. Then again, I hate being a fan boy of anything, old men like me aren't supposed to like things, even literary things.

Then again, I am currently stuck in Buffalo so the real question is: how far am I willing to drive to actually see this when it finally gets distributed in the US?




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