What follows is not a full review per se but a program guide entry I wrote while trying to land Russian crime film Бумер for a festival I was working with. Thanks to some shifting rights issues we ended up losing the film but this is far too good a picture to say nothing about. Plus Yuric asked me to. Someone out there pick this and it's sequel up for an English subtitled release, please.
Late night, a Moscow back alley. A white Mercedes rolls up silently, discharging a pair of black clad men who circle the BMW parked in the alleyway like vultures, discussing whether they should burn or steal it. And so we enter the world of Bimmer, a film hailed for its realistic portrayal of Moscow’s underworld, a place where only the strongest survive; everyone is in the game; corruption reaches all the way to the top and impoverished hordes scurry around the edges looking for a scrap to eat. Bimmer follows a quartet of low grade mobsters, the operators of a car theft ring whose lives are turned upside down when one of their number carelessly insults a larger, more organized, more vicious gang of mobsters. His car is stolen, he is beaten, the group is challenged and in the resultant scrap one of their number develops an itchy trigger finger, someone is killed and the group is forced to flee, on the run from both mob and police.
Much like Refn’s Pusher films or Kitano’s Sonatine, Bimmer is a crime film far more concerned with the criminals and criminal culture than it is with the crimes themselves. Like those films most of the run time is devoted to day to day existence, the overwhelming urge to simply survive. This is a film about character more than crime, a film that repeatedly jumps forward and back in time, flashing both to the causes and consequences of the quartet’s actions. While most Russian genre film aims to prove that Russia can rival America in terms of style and splashy effects Bimmer places its characters squarely in the midst of a Russia decayed and broken down, a place ruled by desperation. It is an entirely glamour-free depiction of the country, one that rings remarkably true. As a result this is a film that lingers well beyond its ironic, bloody conclusion.