The Talkies / Veronica and Vera

...And Sergei encourages Vera's own formidable smart-ass tendencies: when an aunt sends her an old book called Good Housekeeping as a wedding gift, Vera and Sergei ridicule the inscription: "For Vera, the future housewife...

...Some of the slams at Mother Russia are astonishing: Dad, finally reconciled to Vera during a seaside picnic, hugs her under the rusted hull of a beached ship—an obvious symbol of the Soviet Empire run aground...

...Actually, in her bright red fingernails and blond-streaked bouffant hairdo, Vera looks quite a bit like Nancy Sinatra, circa 1966...

...in the context of so realistic-looking a movie as Little Vera, it stands out like a samovar at a keg party...

...But before long he moves in, and no sooner has he done so than he begins to needle Dad heartlessly...

...Granted, excess of this sort is as Russian as caviar and the KGB, but the proper place for hyperbolic Russian dialogue is in hyperbolic Russian movies (e.g., Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible...

...Since true reverence is foreign to most of these kids—whose attachBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...Note the nice irony with which the traditional usage of the word righteous is played off against its infinitely more trivial slang usage...

...one boy asks blandly...

...Played by Natalya Negoda (who, thanks to the miracle of glasnost, can currently be seen in the nonliterary pages of Playboy), the film's eponymous heroine resides in a small, shabby flat with her alcoholic truck-driver dad (Yuri Nazarov) and her complaisant factory-worker mother (Ludmila Zaitzeva...

...T n many ways, the widely publicized 1 new Soviet film Little Vera couldn't be more different from Heathers...

...In the church—which cinematographer Francis Kenny photographs with a dramatically low-angle, sharply tilted, fisheye-lensed camera in dim, otherworldly light, as if to suggest how alien to these kids are the values this place represents—one of the surviving Heathers smoothes down a stray hair with holy water...

...Fundamentally, Heathers is the story—the singularly bizarre and hilarious story, to be sure—of the difficult awakening and ultimate triumph of virtue within one girl's soul...

...ments are as thin as rolling paper, and who respect nothing but good sex, Top-40 music, and fashionable clothing—the death of another human being has little meaning for them...

...Nor can these kids count on any moral direction from their parents or teachers, who, in a show of what they consider tolerance, have entirely abandoned their responsibilities in that line...

...Invited to meet Mom and Dad, Sergei turns up in Bermuda shorts and departs after five minutes...

...In the world of this movie, if it were any closer to the surface it wouldn't be believable...

...In an even more stunning sequence, the camera pans the family's depressingly shabby kitchen while a tinny radio plays e "Internationale...

...but eventually the directionlessness of their existence together begins to gnaw at her...

...that J. D. is, as she tells him, "fucking psychotic" ("You say tomato," he replies genially, "I say tomahto...

...At Westerburg High, the kids read Moby Dick for English class (and a paperback copy of Melville's novel pops up totemically throughout the film), but its moral force doesn't stand a chance against, say, the decibel power of the inane rock song "Teenage Suicide: Don't Do It' tune, ubiquitous in the film, whose wedding of nihilistic discords and hollow message-mongering is too familiar a part of these kids' cultural diet for them to recognize its absurdity or offensiveness...

...Why can't she be like her older brother, Victor (a Moscow physician...

...Patently, to these two members of Russia's Lost Generation, traditional Soviet values and ambitions are a joke...

...You have a real smart-ass here...

...Vera laughs a lot, but it's a deeply sad laugh whose target would seem to be life itself...

...But the critics who have celebrated Little Vera as great art (it has won prizes at the Venice, Montreal, and Chicago Film Festivals) would not, I think, be so forgiving of its failings were it the work of an American or English or French production team...

...and that acts of kindness are finer ammunition against evil than acts of nihilistic destruction...

...Meanwhile, the tensions at home grow apace...

...What did they do to deserve a daughter who smokes, parties, has American money, dresses like a slut...

...we hardly need to hear him whine that "no amount of drinking will help with this sdrt of life...

...There is much to admire in this movie: the very fine performances (especially that of Miss Negoda), the sensitive direction, the courage of all concerned...

...For Little Vera, like Heather, centers on an attractive but troubled teenage girl whose plight we're meant to see as symptomatic of her society's failings...

...And last but not least, there's Veronica, who, despite her complicity with J. D., has a conscience buried somewhere inside...

...My God, how can we go on like this...

...1 But not a frame of this movie is particularly fresh...

...Its gritty, realistic look and its objurgatory tone are a far cry from Heathers's eerie prettiness and sophisticated japery...

...In this little corner of America, sanctimonious pop-psych clichés have all but taken the place of genuine emotions and principles...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 43...

...Or, rather, the truths—namely, that the elimination of Heather #1, far from purging Westerburg High of everything 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 she represents, has succeeded merely in promoting Heather #2 to the role of top bitch...

...This is supposed to be the happiest time of my life," she says, "and I just want to weep...

...The deception works...

...At the funeral for Heather #1, the priest tells his flock that Jesus is "that righteous dude who can solve their problems...

...it's as if she's laughing at the thought that anyone on earth can take anything seriously...

...I is all very vivid and interesting...

...Just to round out the family portrait, Vera gets involved with—and eventually engaged to—Sergei (Andrei Sokolov), a good-looking college student whose sloth and lack of purpose rival hers...

...Having pretended to herself through three murders that J. D. sought only to scare his victims and not to kill them, Veronica finally faces the truth...

...G rotesquely exaggerated though its vision of middle-American teendom may be, Heathers constitutes a perceptive moral commentary upon a very real phenomenon: a generation of by Bruce Bawer teens whose only common value is "coolness," whose only god is fashion ("Grow up, Heather...

...As the film opens, Dad is chewing Vera out: Mom has found an American $20 bill in her purse...

...An ex-hippie teacher—proclaiming sagely that "whether you kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make"—uses the deaths as an excuse to stage a be-in with full media coverage, and spends a class period asking her students to sharetheir "feelings" about the supposed suicides...

...The setting—rendered in shadowless, chillingly cheery primary colors a la Blue Velvet—is Sherwood, Ohio, a veritable 1980s Winesburg, where, at Westerburg High, three rich, beautiful, and snobbish girls named Heather constitute "the most powerful clique in school...

...Mainly, what makes Little Vera compelling is that it's not about Rome or Liverpool or Clairton, Pennsylvania...

...The obvious allusion to Betty and Veronica, those emblems of fifties innocence from the old Archie comics, may be a bit too cute...

...Veronica is of two minds about the croquet-playing, jock-servicing Heathers: she can't bring herself to drop them, but she's put off by their snottiness and cruelty, and confides to her diary her wish for a "world without Heathers...

...Are we gonna be tested on this...

...Dad snaps at Vera...

...We've seen it all before —the long shots of garbage heaps and junkyards, the close-ups of bubbling pots of tomato sauce and rusty, dripping faucets—in dozens of American and European films, beginning with Italian neorealism and continuing down to such recent grimefests as A Letter to Brezhnev...

...Where's her ambition...

...Bulimia's so '87"), who take promiscuity for granted, who use the foulest language as a matter of course, and who find the signal achievements of Western culture utterly irrelevant to their lives and concerns...

...Alas, in its closing sequence the film's uniqueness of theme and tone and situation slips away, and we realize that, on one level anyway, Heathers is simply a variation on the Friday the 13th movies, in which one teenager after another gets bumped off...

...One thinks in particular of Khmelik's script...

...How did she come by it...

...It's quite enough to see Dad weaving around the flat in a vodka-induced stupor...

...At its best, however, Heathers is a splendid accomplishment—an inimitable combination of the outre and the verisimilar, as darkly funny and perversely serious an American movie as has come along in many a moon...

...it's about some godforsaken burg in the Soviet Union...

...There's also fat, pathetic Martha (Dumptruck) Dunnstock, a favorite target of the Heathers' ridicule, whose actual (but botched) suicide attempt is smirkingly dismissed by Heather #2 as "just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people in school and failing miserably...

...When Sergei asks Vera flippantly what her goal is, she quips: "We have a common goal, Sergei, Communism...

...He's utterly psycho, and he comes by it fairly: a few years back he watched his mother perish in a building demolition at the hands of his dad, a cheerfully amoral real-estate developer...

...though much of her dialogue (in translation, at least) is clever, even witty, she has altogether too heavy a touch...

...And later, when Veronica rifles Heather #1's locker and finds a trendy Swatch wristwatch, one of the surviving Heathers says, "She would've wanted you to have it, Veronica—she always said you couldn't accessorize for shit...

...J. D. shares Veronica's distaste for the Heathers, and proceeds, with her help, to wipe out—in highly entertaining fashion—not only the Heathers' ringleader (known to all and sundry as Heather #1) but Westerburg's two bullying football heroes, artfully disguising all three deaths as suicides...

...Fortunately, Westerburg High has a few outposts of decency...

...And at the double funeral for the macho-jerk football stars—whose cleverly conceived "suicide note," forged by Veronica, makes them out to be homosexual lovers—the quarterback's equally macho dad stands over the coffin and, in perfect Donahue-show style, tells the assembled mourners, "My son was gay, and I love him...

...And the picture's final moments bring to mind the endings of both Carrie and Halloween—films of considerably less ambition than this...

...Where's her college acceptance...

...And how does Westerburg High react to the supposed suicides of its three most popular students...

...Well, nobody's particularly upset...

...Every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but director Vasily Pichul and writer Maria Khmelik (a husband-and-wife team) clearly intend for us to recognize the unhappiness of Vera's clan as emblematic of Russian life in the eighties...

...Indeed, Zhdanov makes Gary, Indiana, look rather charming...

...Likewise, we could do without the immoderate irony of a line that occurs more than once: "Cherish the innocence of youth...

...Yes, even cruder than that...

...its grim setting—the city of Zhdanov, an industry-heavy port on the Sea of Azov —is a world or two away from Sherwood, Ohio...

...Fortunately, the most overblown touch of all has been lost in translation: Malenkaya Vera, the Russian-language title of this movie about people who have lost virtually all their faith in the Soviet system, literally means "Little Faith...

...THE TALKIES VERONICA AND VERA T magine a John Hughes cast hijacked 1 by David Lynch, and you've got a pretty good idea of the territory covered by Heathers, a weird, provocative, and gruesomely witty black comedy directed by Michael Lehmann from a script by Daniel Waters...

...The kids' elders are little better...

...But in one sense, at least, the two films are strikingly similar...

...By them...

...It's got full frontal nudity, and a sex scene, and it shows how primitive Russian hospitals are, and it's candid about Soviet problems with gang violence and alcoholism and AIDS...

...Along comes the new kid in town, Jason Dean (Christian Slater), who—for very good reasons, it turns out—is called J. D. Smart, sardonic, and jaded to the nth degree, the lean, black-clad motorcyclist has the laid-back manner of James Dean, the ironic drawl of Jack Nicholson, and the modus operandi of Jason, the bloodthirsty killer in the Friday the 13th movies...

...I love my gay son...

...Within a few hours, Sergei's in the hospital, Dad's in danger of arrest, Mom's threatening to perjure herself to save his skin, and Vera—well, Vera's caught in the middle...

...A male classmate kneels at the coffin of Heather #1 and asks God, in the crudest possible language, how He could have robbed the world of such a hot broad...

...Our heroine is their classmate Veronica (Winona Ryder), whom they've admitted into their circle...

...There's Betty, the awkward, bespectacled childhood friend—an admitted virgin!—whom Veronica dumped when the Heathers took her up...

...It depicts acountry where mothers bear unwanted babies so they can obtain bigger apartments, where everybody's always reaching for the vodka bottle or deciding to hit the sack because there's nothing else to do...

...I can't recall a film that better underlined the failures of sensibility implicit in much current teen lingo...

...For a time, to be sure, Sergei's company appears to satisfy her...

...the crisis comes when Dad, in a drunken rage, ventilates Sergei with a kitchen knife...