The electrifying film on Soviet rock, Leto, is available for replay on Arte

A regular at the festival, the Russian dissident Kirill Serebrennikov was present this year for the fourth time in Cannes with La Femme de Tchaikovsky. But last May, after several years of being banned from leaving Russian territory, the director was finally able, for the first time, to present his new film in person on the Croisette. the wife of the famous composer, and chronicles an unrequited obsessive love that drove the young woman into madness. As announced in a box from the introduction of the film, Tchaikovsky’s Wife is also a painting of Russian society at the end of the 19th century. and, in 2018, it was the Leto slap. A dive into the golden age of Soviet rock still considered his masterpiece, which electrified the festival and which Arte offers in replay on its site until June 28. “At the dawn of the years 1980, the Leningrad underground scene is in full swing.While young people are secretly exchanging the records of Western singers, musicians obtain authorization to perform in public on condition that they play in a club controlled by the State and submit their titles to the Party’s vigilance committee. Mike, the leader of the group Zoopark, and his wife Natasha meet Viktor Tsoï, a young rocker in search of recognition… “With Leto (“summer” in Russian), Kirill Serebrennikov chronicles the emergence of the Soviet rock scene through the artistic friendship and love rivalry of two rockers from Leningrad, an artistically very active city in the early 1980s, in a film that is both vibrant and melancholic, with wild inventiveness. To counterbalance the p otential austerity of black and white, seated concerts and the censorship in force in the USSR, the director notably had recourse to animation by superimposing drawings and colorings on the image to symbolize the creative boiling and the fever rhythm of his joyful band. Punctuated by Soviet rock classics and covers of Iggy Pop or Lou Reed, magnified in pretty dreamlike scenes – the only ones that are in color – Leto is a superb ode to age rock gold.