Authors

Misha Yakovlev¹;  ¹ Film and Television, University of Warwick, UK

Discussion

Olga Stolpovskaya and Dmitry Troitsky’s debut feature You I Love (2004) centres on a love triangle between an affluent Muscovite couple, Vera and Timofey, and Ulyumdzhi, a Kalmyk labour migrant. This film has been described as russia’s first true Gay film. In this paper, I argue that it should be primarily approached as and critiqued for being an Orientalist text. Emblematic of the ‘optimistic’ neoliberal noughties of early-putin russia, You I Love provides an unusual interpretation of what I describe as the ‘New russian sexuality’. Drawing on Brian Baer, I broadly understand the latter as a post- and, importantly, anti-soviet version of russian heteronationalism, centred on the affluent New russian and His ability to consume sexual objects on the deregulated marketplace of desire. Performing a shift from heteronationalism to what Jasbr Puar terms a ‘complementary homonationalism’ in the Bushian context, this film widens the list of acceptable erotic objects for consumption to include racialised bodies of the same gender. Objectified by his lover Timofey, Timofey’s russian girlfriend Vera and the camera’s cinematic gaze, Ulyumdzhi’s body becomes an exotically erotic fetish, stripped of subjectivity and decontextualised from the oppressive structures of russial colonialism that govern this body’s existence within the film’s diegesis, make it legible to russian viewers and render its physical presence in front of the camera possible, in the first place.