Together, Russia and America Make the Worst Film of the Century

 Branded, the recent film written and directed by Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerain, is a shining example for the much-ballyhooed "reset" of Russian-American relations.  Bradshaw and Duleriin have proven that when the former adversaries join hands and work together, they can produce truly spectacular crap.

Released in Russia as Moskva-2017, but renamed in English presumably so the half-dozen people who've read Olga Slavnikova's novel 2017 in translation won't get confused, Branded is a film that defies all attempts as summary.  So let me try:  Misha Galkin (Ed Stoppard) nearly dies as a boy when a constellation shaped like the head of Elsie the Contented Cow zaps him with lightning.  Naturally, when he grows up, he works in marketing, helping Russia learn to love fast food. His boss is a part-time American spy played by Jeffrey Tambor, whose niece Abby (Leelee Sobieski) is in town to produce a reality show about extreme cosmetics and weight-loss surgery.  They fall in love, which means they have sex in his car during a traffic jam.

Meanwhile, a cabal of evil white men on a far-off island are plotting to make the world's population want to be fat.  They sabotage the reality show, throwing its contestant into a coma.  Misha runs away to the countryside, where he spends years herding cattle.  Abby comes for him eventually, but he stays with the cattle.  One night, he has a vision that one of the cows has turned red, so he builds a special wooden hut/altar, slaughters the cow, burns the cow and altar, and pours the resulting ashes all over his naked body.

When Abby brings him back to Moscow, Misha discovers they have a fat, spoiled son, and that Misha now sees the CGI-generated brand creatures that attach themselves to people, growing fatter as their hosts fatten themselves.  Strangely, no one believes Misha when he says he sees these things, and Abby and son leave him.  Misha throws himself into his new work: conning a Chinese company that wants to bring a chain of vegetarian fast-food outlets to Russia (easily the most improbable part of this whole story).  He uses them to finance a media campaign about the dangers of beef, all of which allows the giant CGI monster egg on top of the Chinese company's building to grow and grow, until out hatches…a carnivorous, brand-eating dragon that starts eating the other brand creatures. Misha's efforts lead to a global ban on advertising, and to the return of his estranged wife and son.  Even reality show coma girl wakes up, thin and wobbly, but with great hair.  In the end, the cow-head constellation looks down from on high, and sees that it is good.

When I saw the trailer for this film, I thought it might be a fun cinematic variation on Victor Pelevin's Homo Zapiens (Generation P).  It never occurred to me that the film would prove to be the first new episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in over a decade.  Branded has all the hallmarks of hilariously terrible B-movies, starting with a voice-over narrator providing backstory at every turn.  Tambor and Sobieski fulfill the typical role of actors who are too good for this material, while Stoppard is…perfectly at home.  Finally, Russia has its very own equivalent to Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Visually, the film is all over the place.  Like many recent movies, it is inspired by the aesthetics of the Batman films.  Not, however, those of Christopher Nolan, Tim Burton, or even Joel Schumacher (who gave us Batman and Robin on ice).  Rather, Branded unwittingly shares a sensibility with the 1966 Batman movie starring Adam West and Burt Ward.  When a screen title tells us that the action has shifted to a "Private Polynesian Island," I half expected to see Burgess Meredith waddle onto the screen from his submarine, in full Penguin drag.  And when the head Evil White Man (Max von Sydow) is (spoiler alert!) struck by lightning and incinerated, the ashes and empty clothes left on the ground look remarkably like those of the United Nations delegates dehydrated by the Riddler and his crew.

Of course, this is a work of social satire, exploring ambient anxieties of globalization and Americanization, embodied (literally) through the cliché of the fat American.  Speaking as a fat American, I find this a bit tiresome, but this is the only target big enough for the movie not to miss.

I attended a screening of Branded with two of my undergraduate students, who, unlike me, had not seen the trailer, so they were gobsmacked by the mid-film tonal shift from vaguely realistic satire to trippy imitation of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  And, like me, they were thrown off balance by the many times the movie seemed to end, but failed to do so.

You might think we very much wanted this movie to end, but that is not the case.  I want to see this movie again. I want to see this movie every Saturday night, at midnight.  I want to see this movie in a theater full of people dressed as their favorite Pokemon brand-eating vegetarian dragon.  And I want to be surrounded by people who, when waiting for that cow constellation to appear in the sky,  will join me in chanting "Cow! Cow! Cow!"