Critics reviews

Taking in account Serebrennikov’s quest of artistic freedom against the bulldozer of political oppression, Leto feels surprisingly breezy as it meanders through songs, affairs, and animated sequences. However, this archive of memories takes a strong stance on the slacker culture as a stance of independence.

The film stalls whenever it leaves the musical sphere to focus on the love triangle, which leaves Natalia as weirdly passive actor, caught between the whims of two brooding, magnetic artists. Leningrad apparently imports rock clichés, too. Yet Leto, meaning "summer," comes to life whenever Serebrennikov drops the needle and lets the music hold it aloft.

Weaving a glancing love triangle into a poignant observation on the waxing and waning of creativity, Serebrennikov revels in radiant black-and-white scenes of urban grit.

The film can feature a pop song about summer on the beach and feel just as light and unconcerned and pleasurable as the song itself. That said, its formal techniques are an undigested mess of 1980s-era music-video flourishes and ham-handed to-camera meta-commentary, though I found it remarkably easy to edit those out on the fly (neat trick, that).

Some of Serebrennikov’s formal flourishes, however, are embarrassingly out-of-kilter, and there is thus a curious symmetry between the film and its subject: just as the Leningrad punks discovered Lou Reed and Iggy Pop 15 years late, so Leto is the work of a filmmaker who doesn’t _quite_ have his finger on the pulse of contemporary cinema. And yet the film ends on an undeniably moving note.

This film was initially billed as something of a biopic, but with its languid, freewheeling narrative, its constant blurring of fantasy and reality, its mixing of Soviet garage rock with better-known pieces from around the world, Summer proves a lot more than that: an ode to a world without boundaries.

One of those movies that whisks us into a world that feels both familiar and fresh, like a sense memory of a life we might have lived if we’d been born in another decade or on another continent. In mood and tone—and as a depiction of the beginning of something big, and of the need to shout, if not twist-and-shout—it resembles Iain Softley’s marvelous and largely forgotten 1994 Beatles origin story, Backbeat.

The tension between what was and what could’ve been should be the core of Serebrennikov’s fictionalization—a film that ostensibly toggles between lived-in existence and flights of fancy to locate a sense of melancholy and loss. But what results is a discursive, shambling portrait so divorced from a sense of emotional reality that it simply dissipates into non-existence.

Not a lot actually happens in Leto. There are some beautifully fluid performance sequences and many scenes of the ensemble boozing, jabbering and jamming spontaneously in dilapidated apartments with peeling paint but lofty ceilings and fireplaces any Architectural Digest subscriber would give their right leg for. At heart, it's more concerned with capturing the feel of the early '80s.

The film’s energy and passion (and no doubt, eye for detail) can’t be faulted, but a tighter film could have more pointedly made the connection between the subjects’ brief lifespans and the fate of a young culture of refusal that arguably died when the system it questioned was replaced by a differently oppressive social order.

It almost feels like Viktor’s story is just an excuse to elaborately fetishize this period, an impression enforced by the way Serebrennikov’s attention wanders more toward Mike, a music obsessive who recites biographic information on his favorite artists at parties and shares lovingly crafted notebooks of Lou Reed lyric translations with friends.