ИСТИНА

Aleksei Balabanov, a Russian film auteur of the 1990s—2010s, keen on images of America—both literary and cinematic—radically adapted W. Faulkner’s The Sanctuary (Cargo 200), appropriated road-movie generic features in I want too, made use of action film clichés in Brother 2. This paper centres around Balabanov’s engagement with noir as a tone in his crime drama Brother (1997). Set in 1990s St. Petersburg, Brother - a story of recently demobilized Danila Bagrov (S. Bodrov) who turns to his gangster elder brother to find a job and becomes a killer - is full of noir themes. A strong protagonist with his own set of ethical values and quite personal understanding of truth, a cynical world where the hero’s brother is a betrayer, a decadent city, which feeds upon vitality and strength of the characters, the social critique of 1990s Russia. The film soundtrack is a means of creating a noir tone and atmosphere in Brother. The fan of a Russian rock band Nautilus Pompilius, gangster Bagrov never parts with his player, frequents music shops and even meets the cult singer-songwriter Vyacheslav Butusov (the leader of Nautilus Pompilius) at a small private party. The motifs of death, loneliness, never-ending spiritual quest, which prevail in Butusov’s songs, support fatalistic tones of noir, ‘soak’ the visual track in the noir mood. Analysis of film poetics will help prove the importance of noir as a tone to Balabanov and answer the question—why noir—at the end of the 1990s in Russia?