“Firebird,” the debut feature from Peeter Rebane, is a clockwork romance about the secret love affair between Private Sergey Serebrennikov (Tom Prior) and his superior, Lieutenant Roman Matvejev (Oleg Zagorodnii), in the cutting cold of a Soviet-Estonian Air Force base. Teeming with all the usual corny plot twists and bromidic constructs, “Firebird” feels routine, straight from the assembly line, or whipped up in Romance Movies 101. And while the performances are occasionally charming, they’re routinely stupefied by dialogue as catatonic as the “Yes, Sir”/“No, Sir”s of military life, and about as sultry as Moscow’s cold, suburban streets.
The first half of “Firebird” takes place at the airbase, where conscripts suffer through their training and jump out of their bunks when the ‘Quick! It’s Cold War time’ alarm starts blaring. It’s here that Sergey, a fresh-faced wannabe actor, locks eyes with a slightly older and sterner star pilot, Roman. They rendezvous in the secrecy of Roman’s lodgings, and quickly bond over a shared love of photography and Tchaikovsky and all things theater. There is a warm, auric tint to these meetings (made bolder by their contrast to the barracks’ grubby-green walls and white brick courtyards); but it rarely distracts you from Rebane’s oafish exposition. In one of the picture’s klutziest scenes, Sergey and Roman develop photographs together, and as they dip them in the water baths and briefly brush hands, you feel both an anticipatory excitement and a coincident sense of loss for what is yet to come; and then Sergey ruminates on the fleeting nature of photography, and the symbolism cheapens before our eyes.
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During their time at the base, Sergey and Roman contend with eavesdroppers, pushy friends, and even a mid-flight engine failure on Roman’s plane. The real threat to their relationship, however, proves to be the snooping Major Zverev (Margus Prangel); or at least it would be were he not staggeringly imperceptive. Despite his knowing that Sergey escorts Roman to and from the theater, and that they can often be seen out walking together, and that Roman has pictures of Sergey in his apartment, when he receives an anonymous tip claiming Roman was spotted in flagrante delicto with an unknown male, he has no idea whom the suspect might be. Zverev is a false menace, and in spite of what his cold-blooded looks and come-with-me tones lead you to expect, he soon recedes into his dusty office when it becomes clear that he’s no match for his own incompetence.
In fact, it’s Sergey’s childhood friend and sometime love interest Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya) who’s the real crimp in the relationship. Tired of waiting for Sergey to make a move, and tired of her monotonous secretarial work and report-taking, Luisa starts jonesing for Roman as well. But Rebane’s dicey love triangle is only theoretical. Like Zverev, Luisa is deliberately underpowered, so that her claim to Roman’s love always feels slightly less credible. There are no romantic scenes between Roman and Luisa—except some coquettish moseying on the trio’s trip to Tallinn (which lasts all of 3 minutes)—and this immediately frames her as an imposter: who is she, having shown such little interest, to steal Roman from Sergey? It would be far more compelling, and no less faithful to the true story on which the film is based, to show two, parallel infatuations rather than one; and it would certainly raise the stakes for Roman when he’s forced to choose between them. Instead, Luisa pops up when the story is in need of some friction, and she’s moved around by Rebane like another chalk dot on an airspace map.
Prior and Zagorodnii are at their best in casual conversation, either exchanging sheepish glances or knowing pleasantries under the base’s Big Brother-ish nose. But as soon as things get serious or even faintly sentimental, they talk like the guys in the movies; but less like Bogie in “Casablanca” and more like the oddballs from “The Lobster” juiced up on Byron. “Don’t wait for me”s and “Don’t look for me”s zip by at TV-melodrama pace, and wincers like “And you really believe that if you live a lie long enough it’ll suddenly become true?” land with an audible THUNK! The subtext of their quoting Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky is not “sub” anything; it’s right there on the surface. For instance, when Sergey goes to Moscow to pursue a career on the stage, he sermonizes to his peers about Romeo and Juliet’s forbidden love with such blatant ire and frustration that he may as well stick a post-it on his forehead saying: “RECENTLY REBUFFED.” (He also, without so much as a flicker of self-mockery, stands in an empty room and ponders out loud where the stress lies in “To be, or not to be: that is the question”—a bit done with a lot less beard-stroking by Prince Charles et al. in this BBC sketch from 2017.)
According to Letterboxd’s database, there were more “Romance” movies made in the last 5 years than in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s combined. What this explosion of content has led to is a kind of switchboard operator style among some directors; a style in which scenes from the pool of proven hits are replicated, knowingly or not, to convey the emotion at hand. This, together with the shakes that come with a first feature-length directing job, seems to account for the kind of monotonous moviehopping seen in “Firebird”—it’s like 90 minutes of Netflix autoplays. One minute we’re plugged into “Moonlight,” with its blue-toned sands and rolling waves; then we’re thrown into the dizzying rush of masked dancers in the snap-color sequence of “Ivan the Terrible, Part II”; then we’re transported to the theater, with Sergey wearing Héloïse’s plaintive cut-to-credits look, in a scene lifted straight from “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” Even the chic coastal lounging, of the sort seen in “Call Me By Your Name,” feels washed-out and rented, hung up like old stage scenery. “Firebird” works best when it switches off this cameo movie autopilot; when it’s on, all it does is remind you how rare good Romance pictures really are these days. But hey, at least we’ll always have “Casablanca.” [D+]