Firebird Review: Gay Cold War Drama Drowns in a Sea of Manufactured Sentiment

Oleg Zagorodnii and Tom Prior have faces that could launch a thousand ships. The erudite lovers that the actors play in Firebird might appreciate that allusion, but from the evidence on display throughout this drama, you don’t doubt that director Peeter Rebane would deem it too indirect for his purposes. This is a film, after all, where Roman (Zagorodnii) and Sergey (Prior), some five years after they first ended their clandestine love affair, reunite in Moscow and Sergey bitterly airs out his could-have-beens and should-haves as the men perfectly flank one of the most symbolic fissures in the history of movies.

Speaking of launching, Roman will jack Sergey off in the waters beyond the Soviet Air Force base in Estonia where Sergey is serving his two-year conscription, and just as Sergey reaches the point of climax, two jets dart across the night sky. To say that the filmmakers’ propensity for correlation and juxtaposition is astronomical would be an understatement because it often is astronomical. Even earlier in Firebird, Roman and Sergey narrowly escape being caught by border guards and their spontaneous first kiss results in a sudden burst of rainfall. In a film that doesn’t want for phallic symbols, conspicuously missing are the umbrellas.

Roman and Sergey are in the closet (the film’s story begins in 1977, and homosexuality was illegal in Russia until 1993), and the latter is still haunted by the drowning of his childhood friend, so there’s a certain logic to Rebane’s brazen use of metaphor. You can even say that it’s as desperate as Roman and Sergey’s yearning for one another.

Even after they continue to carry on their affair in a Moscow apartment that they rent—call it a closet within a closet—one man’s sense of abandon remains as undiminished as the other’s practicality. The friction that arises from Roman and Sergey realizing that this is a gap that they won’t be able to close gives Firebird a mood of tragic inevitability, and Prior, who co-wrote the film’s script with Rebane, is fiercely alive to the farce of having to lead a secret life.

But there are clichés and then there are only clichés, and Firebird is suffocated by them. Loosely adapted from the late Sergey Fetisov’s memoir The Story of Roman, the film adopts a gauzy, embarrassingly sincere romanticism way before Sergey sets eyes on Roman, who’s played by Zagorodnii behind a mask of robotic blankness that at times inches the production, notwithstanding its one conspicuously chaste sex scene, into the realm of soft-core erotica.

And it’s as soon as Sergey feels Roman’s gravitational pull that the film’s scenes start to feel as if they’re being reverse-engineered from the main characters’ fears and fantasies. In one, the drill sergeant (Kaspar Velberg) who was already stretching the limits of credibility targets one recruit for being a pervert, then tasks Sergey with fucking him up. In another, Sergey’s friend Volodja (Jake Thomas Henderson), just prior to telling him to “get out of his fantasy world” for simply focusing on a letter from his mother, sternly instructs another recruit on how to properly scrub one of the barracks’ enormous columns: “You’re too soft, harder harder!”

In that moment, you may be forgiven for thinking that Volodja is addressing the filmmakers themselves. Which is probably why a scene late in Firebird between Sergey and his former flame and Roman’s wife, Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya), comes as such a surprise. In a film that makes almost no room for snapshots of its characters caught in difficult, in-between moments, the depiction of these two characters in a limbo of grief, bitter but still capable of kindness toward one another, feels as if it’s actually been ripped from the pages of real life. Otherwise, Firebird is content to feel the sonic boom of manufactured sentiment.