A chronicle of the rise of the advertising industry in Post-Soviet Russia.
Based on the Viktor Pelevin novel, Generation P deals largely in hallucinations, including a speech from Che Guevara's about how and why television is ruining humanity. However, the alternate reality is translucent enough that we can clearly see Moscow as it was in the 1990s where the story takes place. Babylen Tatarskiy has found his place life at a PR agency. He promotes western brands by adapting them to the 'Russian mindset'. Smart, brilliantly funny and full of visual effects and revelations, the film tells a crystal clear yet complex story of how former pioneers fall into the service of the goddess Ishtar, and how the Pepsi generation chose Coke.
Generation P, adapted from Victor Pelevins iconic Russian bestseller, follows the strange adventures of Babylen Tatarsky as he evolves from a disillusioned young man in the drab days of post-Communist Moscow to the chief creative behind the virtual world of Russian politics.When Babylen was a Young Pioneer, his generation received a gift from the decaying Soviet state in the form of a bottle of Pepsi, of Russian manufacture. Not just a beverage, it was also a symbol of hope that some day a new, magical life would arrive from the other side of the ocean. The arrival of this life, and the way it transformed these ex-Pioneers, is what our film is about. In the early Nineties, Tatarsky, a frustrated poet, takes a job as an advertising copywriter, and discovers a knack for putting a distinctively Russian twist on Western-style ads. But the deeper Tatarsky sinks into the advertising world, the more he wonders if he has sacrificed too much for money. His soaring success leads him into a surreal world of spin doctors, gangsters, drug trips, and the spirit of Che Guevara who, via a Ouija board, imparts to him the dazzling theory of WOWism, about how television destroys the individual spirit. Though named in honor of Lenin, Babylen opts instead to believe in his Babylonian destiny, and secretly searches for the beautiful goddess Ishtar, who becomes for him a symbol of fortune. Meanwhile, the people around Babylen - clients, colleagues - perish in the violent dog-eat-dog world of new Russian capitalism. In Nineties Moscow, this is taken as the ordinary course of daily affairs. Tatarsky is invited to join an all-powerful PR firm run by a cynically ruthless advertising genius, Leonid Azadovsky, who invites Tatarsky to participate in a secret process of rigged elections and false political advertising. And as a result of his brilliance, Tatarsky achieves the ultimate, as he creates and gets elected a "virtual" president. But like Faust selling his soul to the devil, this ex-humanist gradually descends to the level of a reprobate, finding that he no longer belongs to himself, but is trapped in a virtual world of his own creation. Babylen returns to his Buddhist friend Gireyev and takes hallucinogenic mushrooms, in attempt to re-create his previous experience. This time Babylen enters the Babylonian dream that has inhabited his sleep for so long. In a ritualistic Sumerian initiation, Babylen replaces Azadovsky as head of the Agency and becomes the earthly husband of Goddess Ishtar, the object of his obsession. There, he is offered control of the mechanism that produces simple human happiness - and can control the world.
