"Moscow" by Vladimir Sorokin and Alexander Zeldovich, summary Automatic translate

"Moscow" is a screenplay written by Vladimir Sorokin and director Alexander Zeldovich between 1995 and 1997. The text was created as the basis for the film of the same name, a complete literary work that depicts Moscow in the 1990s through the intertwining of criminal enterprise, family conflicts, and personal tragedies. In 2000, Zeldovich directed the film "Moscow" based on this screenplay, which received wide acclaim at international film festivals.

Fur coats, a club, and the first snow

The action begins in winter. A voiceover is heard talking about minks: the American mink is displacing the European mink and literally "fuck[ing] it to death — this biological metaphor sets the tone for the entire narrative.

A mother and two daughters — Irina, Masha, and Olga — are sitting at a round table in a nightclub, along with psychiatrist Mark Andreevich. All the women are wearing new fur coats: Irina in mink, Masha in fox, and Olga in ferret. Olga, the club’s singer, takes the stage and sings "Zavetny Kamen" (Treasured Stone) in a cold, distant voice. Mike, Masha’s fiancé, appears with security and two baskets of roses. He announces that he’s taking everyone to the Silver Age restaurant to celebrate their engagement, but immediately receives an important call, gets into his car, and drives off alone.

A suitcase with one-dollar bills

Mike goes to the Moscow Hotel, where Lev, a friend dressed as a Hasid, is waiting for him. Lev carries black cash for Mike, hiding behind the cover of donations to Jewish communities. This time, he brought a suitcase, which, instead of real money, turns out to contain wads of one-dollar bills. Mike takes Lev to the garage, where guards insert a foot pump into his anus and begin pumping air. Lev screams that he brought what they gave him at Ben-Gurion Airport. Mike stops the torture at the last moment.

Early in the morning, Mike brings a barely able-bodied Lev to the club. While Irina talks to Mike at the counter, he takes her to a back office and has sex with her right next to the tiled wall, complaining that he was cheated out of three hundred thousand dollars. Masha appears at the door and leaves silently.

Lev and Masha

Lev meets Olga at the bar: she’s eating a sandwich, he’s looking for still mineral water. Mark appears and takes Olga to a hypnosis session. During the session, he puts her into a trance to a Bach prelude, instills images of a flower and her favorite book, and then begins talking about her red hair and fragile fingers — and abruptly leaves when Olga opens her eyes.

That night, Lev and Masha are drinking at a bar, throwing darts at a world map, destroying Switzerland with Pershings, and drinking B-52s. The world map falls on Masha, Lev cuts out a circle with Moscow in it, and then has sex with Masha right there on the map. Masha returns home drunk. A scene ensues: Olga throws a marble elephant at her and breaks a mirror, Irina pushes Masha out of the bathroom, and then, in the kitchen, he and Masha exchange brutal accusations.

Mark, the surgeon and the man without a lip

Mark visits a plastic surgeon friend at a cosmetic clinic. The surgeon complains that his job is to remove fat from bankers’ wives. Mark discusses crystalline structures and how the entire "ice block" around them will collapse in a second. Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of a patient with a severed lower lip. The guards pull the patient’s lip out of his pocket, wrapped in a plastic bag of ice, and place money on the table. Mark leaves, returns to his office, and places Olga’s photograph face down.

Billiards and murder

Mike confronts Lev with the men who allegedly stashed the money. A man in glasses appears in the billiard room — according to the script’s directions, he resembles the writer Alexander Kabakov. They play Americana, and the man in glasses wins and makes a toast "against those who deceive us." Mike pours vodka over the rim of a shot glass, then embraces the man in glasses, forces the shot glass into his mouth, and hits him in the temple with the pool cue. The man in glasses falls dead. Mike looks at the dying man with irritation: "What nonsense."

Presentation of the ballet school

In the vacant lot next to the club, Mike holds a groundbreaking ceremony for a new ballet school and theater. He breaks down the wall of the old stage with a pickaxe, delivers a speech about 21st-century Russian ballet, and promises to perform Stravinsky’s "Firebird" in a year. Lev tries to explain himself to Masha: he says he loves her, that they are "different." Masha responds with ridicule, reminding him that six years ago in Crimea, he himself told her that he doesn’t have serious relationships.

A walk around Moscow and the metro

Lev takes Olga on a boat ride on the Moscow River and names everything he can see from the water: the Rossiya Hotel, the Kremlin, the Udarnik Cinema, the Christ the Savior Cathedral, the Bolshevichka Factory, the Buran shuttle. On the embankment, Olga tells him about the "quotation mark" — a certain point within any object or person that, when pulled, can reveal everything. Lev responds by telling her how he searched for an eight-carat diamond in the body of a deceased acquaintance in Berlin — and found it. Then they ride the subway, and Olga gives herself to Lev on the leather seat of an empty train car.

Mark’s Jump

Mark packs his suitcase: detective novels in English and a bottle of whiskey. He takes a taxi to the ski jump on Sparrow Hills, climbs up with his suitcase, sits on it, and slides down. He takes off and crashes. On the platform beneath the ski jump lies his body, his broken suitcase, and scattered books. Next to his undamaged glasses lies the novel "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold."

Wedding and a shot

At a wedding in the club’s garden, Masha is in a wedding dress, Mike in a tuxedo. Among the guests are Irina, wearing Mark’s glasses, Lev, and Olga. The "240 Tons" ballet troupe from St. Petersburg performs — three very fat women in tutus. Then a ballerina takes the stage and dances Saint-Saëns’s "Dying Swan." Mike watches her with admiration. Through the scope’s sight — green light, round circle, rangefinder lines — a bullet hits Mike in the chest. He falls face-first onto the table. Masha silently makes her way out of the crowd, enters the club, finds a small pistol among the wedding gifts, and shoots a carton of Coca-Cola.

Lev runs out of the garden, flags down a car, and asks to be taken to Sheremetyevo-2, but gets out at the ring road. He gives the driver his jacket instead of money. He approaches the reinforced concrete sign "Moscow," takes the suitcase containing the money hidden in the hollow "K," and walks toward the highway.

The registry office and the Eternal Flame

That winter, at the registry office, Lev marries Olga and Masha simultaneously. The registrar places two wedding rings on Lev’s ring finger. Irina stands behind him with a bouquet of roses, wearing Mark’s glasses. The four of them go outside, get into a black Chaika, and drive to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Olga asks how there can be a monument to someone who never lived. Lev replies, "Those who weren’t there also have a right to a monument. Perhaps more than those who were." Masha asks where he hid the money. "In Moscow," Lev replies.

Olga, Lev, and Masha stand by the Eternal Flame. The camera pans upward, revealing Moscow. Olga’s song plays in the background.