#except the stuff about the supreme Court decision in Hawaii and domestic partnership in Denmark is true

[wowbright]

((In all seriousness, I just thought I'd contribute to the Goncharov mystique by making up a Soviet remake. BTW, Sergei Bodrov is an actual Russian director, and he did make at least one crime film (Katala) to my knowledge.))

Are you sure you made up the Soviet remake? I started high school in 1989, and one of the few American school districts that taught a full four years of Russian. I didn't take it myself, but my friends who did were obsessed with a Russian gangster movie that had recently come out that they said was based on "the Scorsese classic." Not having been born in 1973 and also living in a house that didn't own a VCR until 1992, I thought they were talking about The Godfather (because I also kept confusing Scorcese with Coppola).

It wasn't until late in my junior year, or maybe my senior year?, that they finally got a hold of a copy that we could watch--European DVDs and videotapes weren't compatible with American players, so it required somebody going on an exchange trip to Russia (a feat in itself), getting the DVD, bringing it back to the US, finding somebody who had a DVD player that could read European DVDs (IDK may be Russian DVDs were different from even European ones), and having that person transfer the Russian version to videotape.

Anyway, I remember going over to my friend Jason's house to watch it. I didn't speak Russian beyond "hello," "very," and "glasnost" (later I would also learn how to say "it [is a] factory"), but I had watched The Godfather movies every Thanksgiving for several years so I figured I'd be able to follow along fine. Also, I had taught myself this Cyrillic alphabet, which wouldn't be relevant if it weren't for the moment that the title screen came up.

"Goncharov?" I asked. "Does that mean 'godfather'?"

Everybody looked at me like I was crazy. "You're joking, right?" my friend Beth (okay actually we weren't friends at all but we were in the same friend group so you know) said.

I didn't know what there was to joke about.

"Wait. You've seriously never heard of Goncharov? The greatest mafia movie ever made?" Jason asked. He was a real cinema snob.

"I thought that was The Godfather," I said.

So many pairs of eyes rolled.

Anyway, we watched the movie. There were no subtitles. Robin, who I knew from church but didn't really hang out with otherwise, took pity on me. She sat next to me and translated the dialogue. Sometimes this annoyed the other viewers, sometimes they jumped in and offered their own translations.

Of course, I didn't need any translation to see the chemistry between Katya and Sofia. Of course, it still remained subtext mostly, and even when they kissed it was open to interpretation about whether it was a kiss of friendship or something more. We were 20 years on from the initial filming of Goncharov, but same sex romances still weren't being portrayed on the silver screen in the U.S. except in the context of Serious Art Films that You Had to Really Hunt Down at the Video Store, and I would imagine it was even more restrictive in Russia.

Still, as a young closeted queer, the story meant everything to me.

I later got my hands on the actual Scorcese Goncharov and would watch it alone in the basement, rewinding and rewatching the scenes between Katya and Sofia so many times that the tape wore out.

Later, in college, we ended up doing our freshman class play (it was a women's college, we had a lot of weird traditions) as a parody of Goncharov. Only in our version, Katya and Sofia's kisses were unmistakably romantic, and at the end of the play they left for Hawaii and got married (it wasn't legal there, but the Hawaiian Supreme Court had ruled that not letting same-sex couples get married or register in civil partnerships was discriminatory, so we were full of hope); Goncharov and Andrey fled Italy for Denmark, where they registered as domestic partners (it was the first country in Europe to recognize relationships between same-sex couples) and transferred their business skills to start a successful floral and produce enterprise.

I realize I have now gotten way way off the topic. But wow, your question just brought back a flood of memories and I'm loving it.

Anyway, I suppose it's possible that my high school friends were misleading me about this Russian gangster movie. I mean, I *thought* the women were called Katya and Sofia, but not speaking russian, I could have been mishearing the whole thing. Maybe my wholesome church friend Robin was making up her translations just to screw with me, and that's why the others joined in so adamantly at times.

And Goncharov's a pretty common Russian name, right? So it's totally possible that there's a Russian movie with that name that has only an accidental relationship to the American one.

Honestly, at this point, I don't care if my snooty high school friends in the Russian Honor Society were fucking with me or not. They introduced me to a wonderfully homoerotic Russian movie, and also to the original Goncharov (1973). And those things warmed my closeted queer heart, and kept me going until I found real queer representation in books and made-up college plays and later in films and TV.

But I sort of hope the Russian version is real. Now that we have the internet, it shouldn't be so hard to find it. If only I still remembered how to read Cyrillic ...