On February 14, the erotic melodrama 'Naughty' hits theaters, the domestic answer to 'Fifty Shades of Grey' starring Alexander Petrov. We tell you in our review why this film, which is seven centuries late, evokes thoughts not of love at all, but, as...

Elvira (Anastasia Reznik), a student of the Faculty of Ecology and the titular naughty one, devotes all her free time to protecting nature – teaching people to feed ducks, rescuing dogs, supporting her boyfriend in his initiative to save chickens. But one pleasant morning, she faces a titanic task – to protect the Bitsevsky Forest from logging.

The forest is to be cut down to build the Bitts-Tower skyscraper (yes, seriously, Bitts-Tower, and the shape is distinctly phallic) by young millionaire and innovator Matvey Rysak (a significant idea was planted – Rysak, obviously, evokes thoughts of stallions), played by Alexander Petrov. And since the Bitsevsky Forest, as announced in the film, is the lungs of Moscow, Petrov in this case is, as it were, spoiling the air. And it seems that this is not the worst idea for the film, but then it turns out that the hero has a heart of gold, as do his hands (in every sense), and everything else, excuse me, as well.

To save the park, the student strikes a deal with Petrov's hero: if she lives with the millionaire for a week, fulfilling all his wishes, and then wants to leave, he will abandon the construction of his skyscraper in the forest. It would seem, what could be simpler – wanting to leave someone else's power? But Petrov's hero knows that in Russia, women don't leave men in power for 20 years, especially if they exploit you like a thing.

Already at the point of the setup – a student and a young millionaire, the latter's specific sexual preferences, a legal contract – 'Fifty Shades of Grey' involuntarily comes to mind, to which 'Naughty' is supposedly our answer (in fact, it's a rip-off, not an answer, something like the Indonesian 'Lady Terminator' in relation to Cameron's film). If not for the authors' desire to title the film in the spirit of bad porn, one could suggest the title '50 Shades of Grey Morality' for the film, since – and it's strange, generally, to say this – the film 'Naughty' is bad not because it's bad cinema, but because it's an immoral film, which is noticeable even in comparison with the American original.

The fatal difference between 'Naughty' and 'Shades' lies not so much in the erotic realm (although Dornan as Richard Gere for millennials is more convincing than Petrov), but in the political: Johnson's heroine is a representative of the middle class, and in Russia it doesn't exist, so a significant part of the conflict that drove the original plot is lost. For Anastasia Steele, a relationship with a millionaire meant a loss of freedom and was therefore a dubious idea, but for Elvira, a relationship with Petrov does not mean a loss of freedom, because what, excuse me, is there to lose, and all their attractiveness or unattractiveness rests solely on Petrov's sexuality. This, of course, is a problem.

Moreover, Grey and Anastasia's contract was a set of clearly defined rules, while Matvey and Elvira's contract is needed primarily to find a legal loophole in it – sexual intercourse is prohibited, but masturbation, for example, is not – and is generally used not to establish the terms of the relationship, but to form Stockholm syndrome in the heroine, which, within the framework of import substitution, should long ago be renamed Moscow syndrome.

Matvey's contract with Elvira is built on a firm understanding that in Russia, once in slavery, few people are so eager to get out of it, and in this case, why would they? Warm, cozy, white chocolate (don't ask), the opportunity to laugh in the faces of traffic cops who dared to detain a millionaire and his companion having fun, who drove half of Moscow at starship speed. In this sense, a film that treats so uncritically the privileges of those who, by virtue of being born into the right family, enjoy not even power, but impunity, makes you sympathize with the traffic cops, and this, it must be said, is almost a miracle. Although if at some point in the film Moscow were attacked by Godzilla, the sympathies of many viewers would surely be on his side.

'Naughty' resembles the film 'Leviathan', in which the protagonist becomes Leviathan himself, and class inequality, the economic gap, the powerlessness of some and the omnipotence of others turn out not to be sad realities of life, manifestations of global injustice, remnants of a feudal social structure, but, in general, a dream, practically characteristics of the city of God. The authors idolize wealth, money becomes an object of sexual desire in the film, Forbes magazine replaces Playboy magazine, and Elvira's sexual liberation, a mandatory trope in such films illustrating self-discovery, here appears largely as a class transition.

At the same time, the 'little people', who within the film are mostly nasty (like the dean) or funny (like the neighbor of Elvira's boyfriend), are given the right to sincerity, the right to be even a little touching, to bake pies 'like in childhood', and what's more – they are given the right to exist, which, obviously, in the creators' view, is already a great, undeserved mercy. The thing is that after this film, you want to exist even less than before it.

In its best moments, 'Naughty' resembles a new season of 'The Bachelor', directed by the director of Egor Kreed's music videos to the music from Radio Energy's airwaves, and in that capacity it can even be watched, and when a swearing Yan Tsapnik appears on screen, it's hard not to do even that – watching a great actor (the series 'The Last Minister' is proof of that) is always pleasant, although some indiscriminateness of Yan Yuryevich may, perhaps, be disconcerting. But in the other moments, of which there are more, the film resembles not even a razor advertisement, like 'Fifty Shades of Grey', but a film adaptation of the porn version of Domostroy, and not only the achievements of the new left and third-wave feminists, but even the ideas of the suffragettes seem something unattainably innovative against the backdrop of this spectacle.

Those who sit through to the finale will probably remember their mother, maybe God, maybe Michel Foucault with his sensible idea that love practices are closely related to power practices. At the end, and this won't be a big spoiler, Matvey Rusak ties up his beloved and loving Elvira in shibari technique and suspends her, giving both himself and her some pleasure, while Elvira's classmate, poor and therefore unattractive (sexuality in the film is closely tied to the size of the wallet), in parallel editing, satisfies himself.

It's easy to think that this is the finale of a film by Lars von Trier – 'The House That Jack Built', for example. There, too, the hero wormed his way into trust, propagated his lifestyle, and so on. But Jack needed to kill women, life was hard, the end was near, hell was scary, but here hell is inhabited and well-appointed, and no one even needs to be killed – everyone is already dead, and it involuntarily seems that neither on that side nor on this side of the screen will it ever end.