Directed by: Mike Lerner & Maxim Pozdorovkin.
As
musicians, Pussy Riot aren’t very good. Even by punk music standards, their
songs are loud, semi-incoherent, with no melody or rhythm, played by people who
don’t really know how to play instruments. But Pussy Riot really isn’t about
the music itself – they are more performance artists than they are musicians.
Angry at Vladimir Putin, and in particular how closely tied his Presidency has
been to Orthodox faith, they staged a “performance” during mass at Moscow’s
Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012. Basically, the stormed the
pulpit, in the brightly colored balaclavas, and performed for 30 seconds,
before be dragged out by security. They expected that would happen. What they
didn’t expect to happen was that they would be charged and face years in prison
– and that they would spark international debate.
The
documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer doesn’t pretend to be an objective look
at the case – the filmmakers are clearly on the side of the members of Pussy
Riot, which is fine, because you have to not believe in freedom of speech to be
against them. You may think that Pussy Riot crossed the line with their
performance – that people attending Church Services have the right not to have
that service taken over by political activists screaming at them. I wouldn’t
necessarily disagree with you on that one – everyone should have the right to
practice whatever religion they want to. But the punishment has to fit the
crime. A 30 second performance art piece in a church shouldn’t cause an
international stir or threaten land the women in jail for years.
What
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer makes clear is that the three women who were charged
were never given a fair trial – basically, they had a show trial, so that
Russian could claim they gave them their day in court, but the odds were
stacked against them from the start, and they never had a chance of being found
anything but guilty, and sent to prison. While the reaction from outside Russia
was almost universal condemnation of Putin and the trial, and in support of
Pussy Riot, that certainly was not the case inside of Russia. Even the women’s
parents, who are usually supportive of their daughter’s performance art
(including, for one woman, having sex in the Biology Museum), think their
daughters should have known better than to take on the Church in the way they
did. Throughout the course of the movie, we see TV shows that are billed as a
debate about their actions, and in reality are just a bunch of people piling on
to see who can decry Pussy Riot the loudest. The reaction from the Orthodox
community is even scarier – ranging from people who claim to have been deeply
offended or “injured” by the performance, people comparing what they did to the
Communists outlawing Religion after the Communist Revolution, and some saying
that women should be at home raising kids, not engaging in politics at all.
What Pussy Riot certainly has their defenders inside Russia, they seem to be in
the minority.
Pussy
Riot: A Punk Prayer is at its best when focusing on the three women put on
trial – Nadia, Masha and Katia – who the filmmakers give a full backstory to,
and treat as individuals – something that most of the coverage around the event
has not given. These are smart, articulate women who do not like what is
happening to their country, and are willing to sacrifice to try and make it
better.
Pussy
Riot: A Punk Prayer follows a traditional documentary approach – all leading up
to the show trial in the last third, where although the women are allowed to
speak rather freely and defiantly in court, it’s quite clear that no one is
really listening to them. Last year, there was an even better documentary than
this called Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about the famed Chinese artist, who was
also arrested. What this movie shares with that one is a look at a once brutal
regime that is trying to sell itself to the outside world as having changed for
the better – when in reality they still have a long way to go. You can argue
that Pussy Riot shouldn’t have done what they did – that it was disrespectful
to other people’s religious freedom – but they did it with a point. That the
Russian government was infringing on THEIR religious freedom. You may disagree
with what they did – but can you really say they deserve what happened as a result?
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