Scenario Films | Isthmus of Perekop

Isthmus of Perekop by Gareth Jones

Publication Date 8th May 2025

‘From the opposite end of our shared continent…’ The spotlights hurt his eyes. ‘…I bring you good will and…’

The opera house was packed. Row upon row. Staring down at him from the gods.

‘…and hopes for our shared future in film and cinema, peace amongst nations!’

The Russian interpreter finished her sentence. He opened his arms to embrace them all. The applause was sparse, for a house of two thousand.

He retreated upstage to join his fellow jurors on their daïs. The screen behind them erupted with computer graphic fireworks as the ceremony continued. Pavel gave him a wan smile from the wings.

Bouquets were handed round to the glamorous guests, as at any film festival. The men were in flashy tuxedos, the women in evening dresses from the nineties. The eighteen-nineties, he thought uncharitably. Not worn since the late Czar frolicked in the waves with his doomed children.

The afternoon seaside outing had been cheerful enough. The imperial summer residence at Livadia Palace whiffing of Churchill’s stale cigar, the trafficking of Europe from one dictator to another. The fading sepia snaps of Roosevelt in his cape. How amusing to have invited them both here, the mausoleum of futile cavalry charges. Someone had blundered. And would again. And again.

The mothballed audience applauded ecstatically. Their local president was promising them the return of better times, Soviet nostalgia with Romanov trimmings.

‘Now the reception,’ murmured his interpreter and took charge of him.

They found their places at one of the round tables with white starched tablecloth and carefully laid out silverware. The wine was good, the caviar excellent, the conversation desultory, their English sparse and his Russian no better. His immaculate interpreter kept her uniform jacket buttoned and spoke when spoken to but small talk seemed above her pay grade. His fellow jurors were nowhere.

A hand grabbed the empty chair beside him and swung it round precariously close to his ear, and a dark suit and loosened tie slumped onto the wicker frame, arms leaning over the back of it, legs akimbo, vodka bottle in one hand and no glass in the other. A flick of bloodshot eyes at the interpreter commanded her services and a flow of amiable discourse followed, which she jotted down into fluent English then read out in a deadpan voice, not lifting her eyes from the page. ‘You can fuck off,’ she recited, expressionless. ‘Just fuck right off. Get the fuck out of here. Who invited you anyway?’ Ignoring both her principals, she paused, frowned with a perfectionist self-criticism, crossed out her note and settled for ‘You dishrag.’

Thick eyebrows were raised in sardonic inebriation with a swig from the bottle. It was clearly not advisable either to ignore him or to wind him up. ‘The festival,’ he answered in a measured way and the Russian translation followed instantly.

Another swig. Another growl. An imperious wave of the hand. With a measured lilt she read her scribbled note. ‘Well I’m the fucking boss and no one told me.’

‘I was contacted from Moscow,’ he answered mildly, grateful for the delay in translation, in which clearly nothing was lost.

‘Those fucking cosmopolitans.’ Another swig and a nod at his host, who was ignoring them at the bar. The interpreter hesitated fractionally before going for ‘Pavel the Pillock’ though the word used sounded rather less flattering.

‘I hope I haven’t offended you,’ seemed the response least likely to provoke the rage seething beneath the heavy, vodka-sodden ironies.

‘Fucking westerners, can’t even fight,’ came the disgusted response, rendered as expressionless in English as a computer voice.

On no account enter into the spirit of the exchange, she had clearly been taught. Stay objective. Do not emote. Do not comment. Do not inflect. ‘Fucking cowards and degenerates. Queers, poofs and …’ She frowned as her vocabulary ran out and the speaker outpaced her but seemed otherwise unflustered. ‘You come here and lecture us on our history. We don’t need you here, you don’t belong here. Just fuck off out of our country!’

The interpreter’s monotone was impeccable but the drunkard was drawing sympathetic glances and might well pick a fight. It would not be sensible to look away, so he held the bloodshot eyes and imitated his interpreter. ‘I spoke about peace. I hope it will be possible. I make films, not politics.’ The Russian version sounded as vibrant as a shopping list. At least she was consistent.

‘Peace!’ A forced, crazy laugh that she did not try to imitate. ‘You chop up our country and expect peace?’ She flicked her notebook and started a new page. ‘You disembowel the Soviet Union,’ she paused, ‘disembowel, is that correct?…’ he nodded ‘could be’ and she continued flawlessly ‘… split Ukraine from Mother Russia and now you complain we take back Crimea.’

‘I did not come here to complain,’ he ventured and waited for the Russian to flow. ‘But surely two countries can co-exist.’

‘Two? We’re one. One fucking country. You’ll see! We’ll show you!’ He was getting exercised, waving the vodka bottle, shoving his face up close. Hands restrained him, calmer voices soothed, telling him he was drunk and couldn’t treat a guest this way. ‘It’s my fucking country and he’s my fucking guest. I’ll do what I like with him,’ she concluded as they dragged him away.

The interpreter quietly folded her notebook but this attack was not to be ignored. It was aimed especially at his friend and host Pavel.

‘Please help me,’ he murmured and took the dance floor microphone beneath idly revolving glitter balls. ‘May I have your attention ladies and gentlemen.’ His interpreter took the microphone without undue haste. ‘I need to tell you how grateful I am to Pavel Igorovich for this kind invitation. Pavel is a great name in world cinema. A respected critic and curator who has brought generations of top international films and film stars to Russia.’

The Russian delivery might have been an order for boiled eggs. Standing at the bar, Pavel smiled gamely, that smile of his that meant nothing and left nothing behind. Hollywood, this was not, still less the Oscars.

‘Film is a major influence for world peace. A medium all can understand and share. I’m sure in time his contribution will be recognised. Thank you.’

There was no comment and no applause, besides a derisive cheer from the drunkard. The interpreter switched off the microphone. ‘I’m sorry he was rude,’ she murmured without making eye contact. ‘It happens.’

‘Not your fault. You were pretty cool.’ He gestured her towards the bar, where Pavel had dematerialised, as he did when approached on the Croisette in Cannes by filmmakers begging him to screen their films, but only if they had already been turned down by the A-list festivals.

It was still not clear to him why Pavel had chosen him as president of this jury, besides a glancing reference in his last film to the war in Chechnya, which might just have been taken as referring to Russian conscripts, poor bloody kids, always in the front line, never knowing why. But in the international rubric the Russian forces were the bad guys and it didn’t pay to look closer. He had always taken the unfashionable line and his career had paid the price. That’s why he was here and not in Sundance, Venice or Berlin, let alone Los Angeles. So many rejections, it was hard to keep going. And now he was staking his future on a flaky jury in a trumped up film festival in Yalta, Crimea, sanctions-busting along with the second rate film fraternity from France, Italy and elsewhere, a pay-back to Pavel who had rescued him from complete ignominy by giving him an honourable première in Moscow nearly ten years back, when Russia was still admissible or salonfähig as the German would say. What was he to say, thanks Pavel, you’ve hijacked Crimea so no thanks, I’m busy? You accept a distinction, you pay it back, a code of honour observed by few in the whoring media scene but which he clung to stubbornly, much to his own disservice.

Leaning on the bar in search of a bottle that was not vodka, he asked her what she might like but she was ferreting in a brief case, so as not to be seen looking at him, muttering ‘Good speech. You’re brave.’

‘Thank you, that’s very charitable,’ he replied, aware he had made an ass of himself. Idealism fits uneasily with this kind of trade, he should have kept his mouth shut.

Without looking up she flicked her eyes at the table where the drunkard was haranguing the nomenklatura gathered over vodka. ‘Be careful, won’t you. Ukraine doesn’t exist. Crimea is Russian now. The festival was meant to be a victory parade.’

‘So why ask me?’

‘Window dressing. International recognition for Russian Crimea.’

‘I’m an independent. They should have asked the BBC.’

‘I expect they did.’ Her hand left the briefcase holding a powder compact.

‘Well I wish I’d been told,’ he smarted, less at the humiliation than the compromise to his principles.

‘No one tells you that sort of thing.’

‘Except you?’

‘Maybe.’ She inspected herself cursorily in her powder mirror and snapped it shut with immaculately manicured fingers. ‘We speak the same language.’

Such a simple phrase, so heavy with innuendo. But did she know that? Or was her English a hit and miss affair, as with so many fluent learners, indeed how much of the cold response might be down to her lack of subtlety in conveying his meaning?

He poured two glasses of the dark red Saperavi, glancing discreetly at the regulation black trouser suit with white blouse, the black hair scraped flat off a broad, pale forehead, the prominent cheekbones concealing deep black eyes. ‘Grown on our Crimean hills,’ she observed, declining his toast. ‘A good year.’

One of the nomenklatura detached himself from the drunkard and approached with an obliging smile and a scrap of paper, which he slipped under her glass. Her face closed as she scanned the list and jotted some names in Latin script beside the Cyrillic.

‘What’s this?’ he enquired, leaning over her.

‘The winners you will announce tomorrow,’ she murmured, edging away.

‘Winners? We haven’t finished screening!’

‘The screenings will continue. But these will be the winners.’ The smile was functional, factual. ‘I know it’s not usual procedure. But here it is different.’

He made to screw up the list but she grabbed his wrist with a surprisingly powerful grip, folded the paper in half and tucked it conspicuously into his top pocket. ‘These are the good guys,’ she hissed with a nod at the high table. ‘The Muscovites, come down for the weekend, the Kremlin’s men. It’s the locals you need to watch out for. They’re kind of…’ She snapped her briefcase clasp, keeping her voice down. ‘Mention an independent Ukraine, they get upset. Crimea is the least of it.’

‘But why so furious?’

‘They’ve lost an empire. They want it back.’

He made to object but she erupted in an extravagant sneeze that ended the conversation. ‘I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry,’ she apologised in a wildly demonstrative English, which might have been taken from an actor’s handbook. ‘At least I’m not infectious!’

Her exaggerated laughter was noted with male curiosity from the nomenklatura table and she now placed a hand firmly under her visitor’s arm, implying it might not be safe to hang around. ‘Your car is waiting.’