#uhhh for those who aren’t aware goncharov is a fake movie tumblr collectively made up for funsies

[droppingartintotheinfinite]

Ok! So! Big Goncharov revival has happened on tumblr recently, and I’ve decided to take the opportunity when it’s handed to me to talk about one of the best movies I have ever seen.

Bear with me for a moment.

For those unfamiliar, Goncharov (1973) was a movie directed by Matteo JWHJ0715, a (then closeted) bisexual filmmaker from Italy. Martin Scorsese then lent his name to it to provide a popularity boost for the American release, which is where we get the common misconception that he directed it.

It stars a Russian mob boss named Goncharov (no first name given, for reasons I’ll discuss later) who’s brought a few key members of his gang to Naples, Italy in order to get revenge against Italian mob boss Mario Giglioli. (A good breakdown of the movie’s plot can be found in @mst3kproject’s review, which I would link here but tumblr is being weird)

Along the way, we’re introduced to his wife, Katya Goncharova, his right hand man, Andrey, Mario’s wife, Sofia Giglioli, and a few others.

Goncharov is an almost nauseatingly stereotypical man. What stereotype, you ask? Why, all of them! He’s a tall, heavily built man with a thick accent and a tendency to reference “Mother Russia” in tones of alternatively nearly reverential praise of Soviet era Russia and harsh condemnation of the Russia he leaves during the movie - the Russia directly after the Soviet Union’s fall. The way he does this is heavy handed and obviously written by a man who’s never visited Russia in his life in any era, to the point where my own lax education on the country doesn’t actually leave me unqualified to analyze the film, despite the majority of the main characters originating from it. (Though I’m sure there are great analyses to be made on the cultural inaccuracies within the film, especially given how many are entirely deliberate- but I’ll get to that later)

He’s also exhaustingly heterosexual, and very much being so with an eye towards to the beliefs of the time. There are many scenes in Goncharov that are hard to watch today, and many of the scenes between Goncharov and Katya are among them, especially the dinner scenes.

Here, you may be saying, “But Sol, didn’t you say the director was bi?” And hey, hold your horses, we’ll get to that.

Katya, Goncharov’s wife, is on the surface an ideal 70s housewife, if a bit more murderous than the average due to her mafia husband. She makes him dinner every night, defers to his whims without argument, and spends most of their shared scenes standing behind him, never beside.

She also violently murders him to avenge her lesbian lover, but as I’ve said, we’ll get to that.

Mario Giglioli, Goncharov’s rival, is just Goncharov with an Italian accent. I think if they could have cast Robert De Niro twice and had him play Mario as well as Goncharov, they would have. He has a german shepard and Goncharov makes one of his henchman steal it near the start of the film. I am unhinged about this man.

One of Goncharov’s few named henchmen is called Icepick Joe. He’s an ostensibly minor character who gets a bizarre amount of screentime covering his personal journey of *checks notes* petting Mario’s dog, stealing said dog, murdering his wife, stealing Mario’s dinner, and dying alone due to the poison in said dinner while the dog abandons him to run off into the woods.

He is quite possibly the most important character in the entire movie.

To explain why, I have to introduce two more characters, who fans of the film have no doubt been waiting for me to bring up since they started reading this post.

But first, let me talk about Goncharov’s marriage for a bit!

Goncharov and Katya are often said to have a loveless marriage, but the truth of the matter is a lot more complicated than that. There are moments throughout the film where it’s implied that they care about each other deeply, and that in any other circumstances they might have a perfectly healthy relationship, but they’re so mired in the idea of being the perfect mafia man and the perfect mafia man’s wife that everything they say or do is filtered though so many layers of performance that any actual affection they might hold for one another is suffocated under it.

No one in the film ever refers to Goncharov by his first name. There are a few contenders for what it might be - he signs his name N. Goncharov, which some have hypothesized could stand for Nikolai, some of the early promotional material called him Ivan Goncharov… but there’s nothing sufficiently internally consistent for it to be stated as his first name with true confidence.

This is deliberate. In an interview, JWHJ0715 stated: “[Goncharov] is a man consumed by his work. He’s forgotten how to be anyone other than Goncharov, mob boss, and the lack of a first name is part of this. […] Goncharov is a man who’s lost his identity in favor of the image he projects”

Katya, conversely, is only ever referred to by her first name, even when speaking to characters who would be expected to use her last. It’s not quite as complete an erasure - there are a few moments where she’ll be introduced as Katya Goncharova instead of just Katya, but the vast majority of the time she’s referred to as either Katya or “Goncharov’s wife”.

This, too, is part of an erasure of identity, though in a different way. Katya has so thoroughly separated herself from the role she plays as Goncharov’s wife that in the few moments she is referred to by her full name, you can spot a split second of confusion, like she doesn’t know who’s being spoken about.

There’s a sense that Katya is unable to be herself with Goncharov, that she’s become so caught up in the person she thinks he wants that she can’t be the person she actually is, and it’s masterfully played as this slowly poisons her ability to care for him and eventually leads to her faking her death and later killing him.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

(And, uh. Also ahead of my ability to write. This is getting long, so I’m going to break it here and post the rest later.)