A young rock singer, Bananan, falls in love with Alika, a teenage siren and a mistress of a Soviet Mafia godfather figure. Elements of drama, American gangster films, and cheap romance lead to a thrillerlike chase and a final bloodbath in which both men die. Also interwoven through this collage are dramatic recreations of the murder of Tsar Paul I. Throughout the film, songs by once-banned rock groups, especially Aquarium and Kino, fill the soundtrack.

Assa. Directed by Sergei Solovyev; screenplay by Sergei Livnev and Sergei Solovyev; cinematography by Pavel Lebeshev; production design by Marxen Gauhman-Sverdlov; music by Boris Grebenshchikov. Cast: Sergei (Africa) Bugayev, Tatyana Drubich, Stanislav Govorukhin, Alexander Bashirov, and Victor Tsoi. Color, 152 min. Mosfilm Studios production, 1987.

5. Sex, rackets, and rock ‘n’ roll are the ingredients of Assa (1987), Sergei Solovyev's postpunk glasnost gumbo, featuring director Stanislav Govorukhin as a cool godfather figure and Tatyana Drubich as his young, unearthly moll. (Photo: Kinocenter and Sovexportfilm.)

In a radio interview, director Sergei Solovyev called his film Assa (1987) “a cheap area rug with strands of Bach woven in.” To translate this poetic expression into the boring language of film criticism would be to say that in Assa, Solovyev has turned positively to the aesthetics of postmodernism. Deliberately eclectic, the film combines disjointed elements – a detective story, a melodrama, and other “lower” genres – and employs all with a high goal in mind. It flirts with kitsch and pop culture, alludes to real and made-up quotations (often knowingly meaningless), and mocks everything, including the most popular notions.