Luna Park

This French-Russian production is a visually stark and potent film about life in post-Communist (and pre-Putin) Russian. The main character is Oleg, a young, anti-semitic Muscovite bodybuilder who is the leader of a gang whose goals is showing brute Russian strength. They live in Luna Park, an amusement park, a place of wild rollercoasters and distorting mirrors, where they regularly beat up on foreigners and Jews who come there. During a drunken confessional, a close relative tells Oleg that his father is a Jew and still alive in Moscow.

This fact turns Oleg's life upside-down, partly out of revulsion from whom he is descended, and partly because he wants to know (and be) with his father, and he must someway reconcile himself with this with discovery.

The film is not one necessarily of thoughtful, quiet introspection, but of hi-jinx, clashes, and turmoil, and interactions. Oleg vacillates between his role as the participatory leader of a brutal gang, and that of a son learning about his father. Without giving away too much information, Luna Park, the amusement park where it begins, is where it ends, and is a metaphor for Russia and what it has to face.

"Luna Park" may not be a pretty film. There's the ugly side to human nature depicted in the brutal actions of the skinheads and the decay of Russian society that the skinheads blame on foreigners and Jews. But the majority of the film regards Oleg's journey and transformation as he gets to know his father, and this is the rewarding, and ultimately beautiful side of the film.