Cast: Nikita Mikhailovsky, Marat Gelfand
This film was shot in 1987. It focuses on the 1980s youth culture's attitude to the dissident culture of the 1970s. The plot unfolds around the main question of whether one should emigrate or remain.
The film activates the space of a fundamentally non-existent game, Playing XO. The oblique cross and zero are the two central symbols of a generation. Here is life / (a slanted line), but life is crossed out (X) and a 0 is formed – we play “XO” (Ho!). XO is an inductive game, the rules are set as the game is played... Two friends play XO, noticing or forming crosses and zeros around themselves, with Mark being a cross, and Nikita being a zero. This game cannot have a winner and cannot have a loser...
A scene of Mark heading off to America plays out against the backdrop of a television show in which Stalin is replaced by Marshal Zhukov, and both of them are replaced by scenes from Bunuel’s An Andalusian Dog. The use of these scenes is fantastic since, at the time, Bunuel could never be shown on Soviet television... Scenes shot in Moscow are interrupted by dialogue between Mark and Nikita taking place in a Leningrad Art Nouveau-style courtyard against the backdrop of a sculpture by Alexander Benois... Their dialogue contains a whole string of concepts and statements that are essential for the 1970s – "fear," "business," "home" and finally the theme of "emigration or departure." After the reading of poems of Joseph Brodsky (a key figure for dissident culture), we see scenes from Bunuel. A paranoid context arises thanks to this conflation of episodes. Mark's final day in the USSR is played out according to the rules of this context. Necrorealistic motifs pile up as the film approaches an end. In a studio apartment belonging to Leningrad-based “new” artists, a scene is played out involving the false suicide of some of the heroes.
Then, there is the finale, a rite of passage through death, combined with the monologue of Mark (the cross) about three generations of his family who were buried beneath the rubble of the fatherland...
This game cannot end, and therefore, in the last frame, the heroes continue walking along an endless Leningrad street and argue...