Putin's Kiss

Kino Lorber Films | Release Date: February 17, 2012

tbd	USER SCORE No score yet

USER RATING DISTRIBUTION

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

Watch Now

Stream On

Buy on

Stream On

Review this movie

VOTE NOW

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Please sign in or create an account before writing a review.

Check box if your review contains spoilers

0 characters (5000 max)

User Reviews

User score By date Most helpful

maulenJun 19, 2017

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. If, like many of us, you are a kind of person who came to watch Putin’s Kiss to witness the glory of our dear leader Vladimir’s kissing skills, sorry, he isn’t even half naked in this one (SAD). In fact, Putin’s Kiss isn’t even his, it’s Masha Drokova, an avid political activist of youth organization “NASHI” who kisses Mr. Putin on a cheek of all places. Apart from some smug liberal journalists talking about the size of Masha’s breasts, the film features some NETFLIX worthy drama. Wonder what Russian youth does when they aren’t hacking the U.S. elections or kicking the hell out of each other at school? Get your cofvefe and enjoy how Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen gets the World Cinema Cinematography Award in Documentary at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival by gluing together all kinds of videomaterials from different news channels, interviews and dark alley camera shots. For an outsider, it is a surprising and thrilling experience to witness how Putin’s regime uses the youth, and how the dermocracy works. First surprise, Russian youth don’t drink no alcohol, real patriots of NASHI (Ours) do sports, don’t smoke and march every year in size of 30,000 heads in Moscow after being trained at Putin Jugend camps. Second surprise, NASHI is an antifascist movement, and by the way, fascists are liberals, dissidents and the opposition. Pedersen, of course, discusses this affair from the point of view of Russian liberal journalist, Oleg Kashin (Good), who bravely fights with his oppositionist friends against NASHI, who occasionally **** on their cars and beat them to death (Evil). Now, Masha Drokova is a very typical middle-class Russian girl, who loves her country and older men in power. She follows Vasily Yakemenko, the founder of NASHI, to become one of the leaders of the movement herself while still a teenager. Trouble starts when she joins Moscow University’s school of journalism and becomes friends with the good guys (Oh No!) What a great metaphor and a message, the girl who kissed Putin becomes a liberal oppositionist. Sounds good, doesn’t work. Problem is that Pedersen tries to craft a coming of age story of a mislead girl, who then comes to realize the great goodness of liberals and evil evilness of her friends and peers. However, it doesn’t stick, Masha doesn’t regret joining NASHI, even as journalist Kashin pushes her to say it on camera. Liberals burn a book by NASHI’s founder, after Masha and NASHI are compared to Hitler for suggesting burning a book. Something went wrong with the story telling, the meaningful commentary and freedom of interpretation gets lost in a hectic montage of the film. The dynamic shots are mixed with long shots of a city landscape and seemingly every video material Pedersen could find on a subject, which makes the movie unnecessarily long. While the film fails to become a soul-touching story, it avoids being ignorant to Russian context, Ms. Pedersen follows the Danish filmmaking tradition of putting a personal story in the center, however her previous experience in filming in the 90’s in Russia allows her to show the broader picture. As a documentary about the inner workings of Russian democracy and particularly putting a spotlight on a little-known youth movement, Putin’s Kiss does its job, it did attract over 300 people at its premiere at IDFA and according to IDFA Founder Ally Derks who interviewed Pedersen, those 300 were not disappointed.… Expand

1 of 1 users found this helpful10

All this user's reviews