Russian Lolita (2007)

You won't be disappointed!

Great Film overall

Better Late Then Never

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is blasphemy to one of the best novels ever written and one of the very worst movies I ever seen. There is too little plot and too much sex for mainstream movie, but too little sex and too much talking for porn movie. Beside that, story is at average porn level, sex is lousy, and directing, acting and camera are terrible. Movie has no quality at all. At the one hand, there is no artistic quality, and at the other you can not even jerk off while watching it. Through out whole thing I was thinking about Nabokov turning in his grave, but after last scene I think I died and started to turn in my grave. I would give it zero if it was possible, but unfortunately I have to satisfy with 1/10.

This is the first Lolita film that presents an engaging and plausible story all the way through. Nubile nymph Valeria Nemchenko plays a 14-18 year old virgin (age is never stated) who lives with her mother in a nice home set in the woods somewhere in Russia. An older man looking for a new life sees an ad for a room for rent and meets budding beauty Aliza. The plump mother rents him the room and soon after Gennedy and mom begin a secret affair explicitly shown. Aliza can hear them so she watches through the peephole and becomes inflamed with lust and jealousy. When mom is not around she overcomes her shyness in stages first chatting then sitting on his lap and as each day goes by, the man begins to go crazy. He is trying to be loyal to the mom but the little girl is persistent and becoming bolder. Finally Aliza rejects him because he wants to continue with mom. He is tortured by her absence as the days go by. After trying to resist he gives in and goes to her. He says he wants her alone even if it means mom will become vindictive. Little Aliza is beside herself with joy and they plan a rendezvous.Here is where it beats the other Lolita movies by a mile. The other films make you guess about the affairs but this one bares all and it is very wild. They stay in the soft core arena with no male penis and no insertion visible but full nudity from then on when they meet. Mom of course, finds out and there is a surprise ending I will not reveal. A sexy and erotic Lolita story that is interesting and well shot.

In 1957 Vladimir Nabokov wrote "Lolita", which is now regarded by many as the second greatest English-language novel of the 20th century (after "The Great Gatsby"). But Nabokov was also Russian emigrant, who was a very well-regarded novelist in his own country and his own language before he was chased out of Russia by the Communists and out of Europe by the Nazis. English-language filmmakers have struggled to adapt his brilliant but controversial novel over the years. The great Stanley Kubrick was not entirely successful, and the hack Adrian Lyne probably shouldn't have tried. So it seems encouraging that Russia might attempt to reclaim a native son and one of the great Russian authors by doing their own adaptation of "Lolita". This movie unfortunately though is pretty much a travesty.I have to cast around to find anything good to say about this. It does put back in the sex that the earlier adaptations were (understandably) quite coy and circumspect about, but the problem is it takes out pretty much everything else and turns the whole thing into basically a softcore porn film. The whole narrative of the book is largely dispensed with so that it is reduced to just a ridiculous sex fantasy about a male lodger who comes to room with a widow and her young daughter and has a whole lot of sex with both of them. The end.Before anyone gets too worked up though, the young "Lolita" in this version (called "Alice" here) is not the 12-year-old girl in the novel or even the more mature 15-year-old actresses that played the part in the two movies (Sue Lyon and Dominique Swain). The actress here, Valeria Nemchenko, when she loses her pig tails and baby-doll dresses, is obviously about 20, so this is not so much unwholesome as it is just, boring and pointless. Yeah, Nemchenko is quite attractive, and most males probably won't mind watching her have sex, but she literally does so for at least 30 minutes of the running time. There are also some graphic sex scenes with the mother, Olga (Marina Zasimova), who unfortunately looks a lot more like Shelley Winters (from the Kubrick movie) than Melanie Griffith (from the Lyne). And suffice, it to say that, like with most softcore porn, once the sex scenes start they just don't stop right up until the ending, which is both unbelievable and unbelievably stupid. This is pretty much just a porno parody of the great novel.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel, "Lolita," must be kind of popular in Russia. I know of one Russian who taught herself English just to be able to read the original novel. That's understandable. It's a great novel, in many ways a masterwork. But that makes it difficult to transpose to the screen and none of the versions have been particularly good. Here, in print, is Humbert Humbert excoriating himself for having an affair with a pubescent girl: "I was a pentapod monster." Now, how do you translate that devastating comic comment to celluloid."Russian Lolita" is updated to the present, probably in order to save money because the budget is clearly not lavish. The performances vary. The characters of Humbert and Charlotte (with different names of course) are satisfying enough, but the director has allowed the Lolita character, Valeria Nemchenko, to overact outrageously, giggling, skipping, and sucking her thumb.She's already too grown up, already into her growth spurt, so she's thin and gangly. Nothing wrong with that except that what made the novel so impressive was the fact that the young girl was REALLY young. Nemchenko looks as if she may already have been around. And THIS Lolita is far more deliberate in introducing the writer to the joys of sex, whereas the original was nothing more than the whimsical teasing of a child. Here, Humbert is not obsessed with Lolita. It's the other way round.There's a good deal of nudity to liven up the film, enough to demonstrate that Nemchenko is past puberty. The character does retain some of the original's traits. Sex is sex but kissing is disgusting stuff, at least at first. The sex scenes are lengthy and there is female nudity but all the sex is simulated, as in a soft core love story.I was able to follow the plot well enough because I'm familiar with the novel but it has to be admitted that I may have missed some cinematic grace notes because my command of Russian doesn't extend much beyond "cabbage" (kapusta) and "clown" (klun), and maybe a few remnants of Nadsat from "A Clockwork Orange." I don't think it matters much because I doubt anyone was expected to take this as a serious attempt to put "Lolita" on film. Instead, it's a parody of a parody. A man moves into a house with a plump mother and skinny daughter and it all ends up in a happy threesome.No kidding.