»Soviet Jeans« | Optimism instead of socialism

In 1979, at the height of the Cold War, the Latvian city of Riga was apparently not a good place to get denim from the West. The entire Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev seemed to be a bad place, at least not for those whose ideas of the good life differed from those of the KGB. And the secret service was everywhere. On every corner, they had their sycophants and nerds, who were supposed to report back to the top whenever someone stepped out of line. The spies were omnipresent.

The theater where the young Renars (Kārlis Arnolds Avots), the protagonist of the series in the Arte media library, works as a costume designer and tailor, is also riddled with bugs and listening microphones. But the busy Renars, who lives with his grandmother, a highly decorated veteran of the Great Patriotic War, also has a side job: In the evenings, he approaches tourists from the West to persuade them to sell him their jeans, sunglasses, or other valuable goods. Products in which he—together with a partner and illegally, of course—runs a brisk trade. Therefore, Renars is particularly vigilant, knowing the tricks and gimmicks that allow him to always stay one step ahead of the minions of the state apparatus.

He also manages to win over the young Finnish theater director Tina (Aamu Milonoff), who has just arrived at the theater for a production of "Hamlet": "The KGB is taking good care of everyone here," he warns her. And indeed, the guest director is soon advised that the play's main villain should abstain from alcohol consumption. After all, there's a risk "that the audience will recognize our head of state in the character." To which the shrewd Tina replies: "So you think Comrade Brezhnev is an alcoholic?"

The drawings of the series' characters are a bit woodcut-like. Yet some of them don't seem so far from reality:

The KGB men are unscrupulous hypocrites and bootlickers, constantly plotting against each other and solely interested in their own well-being while maintaining a façade. (Men like those you can find at any FDP party conference today.) At the same time, they are also figures of fun: They wear ill-fitting suits and horn-rimmed glasses, and when they're bored during office hours and think they're not being watched, they build little constructions out of matchsticks on their desks.

Because Renars doesn't follow his instructions, he is arrested one evening and taken to a psychiatric hospital, where he is given a rapid diagnosis: He suffers from a "fixation on Western culture," which, in the worst case scenario, could even develop into "sluggish schizophrenia" if no improvement occurs. To take the first step toward recovery, Renars is first asked to thoroughly clean the prison toilet. "Work frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts."

But as sometimes happens in fairy tales: The mental hospital, which in reality is a prison run by corrupt KGB doctors for disobedient skeptics and independent thinkers, eventually becomes a springboard for the shrewd Renars to a kind of second career in prison. After all, even a KGB doctor can hardly say no when he's promised a West German-made mixer ("for your wife"). Because the jack-of-all-trades Renars is not only a good tailor and clever, but also a good businessman, he and the other inmates of the prison disguised as a psychiatric hospital are soon producing jeans for the black market, which were so coveted in real socialism.

So it has it all: a romantic romance, a perfectly good comedy, a belated mockery of real socialism, a modern fairy tale. And a bit of propaganda for the old West lie that those who are hardworking and clever and don't lose faith in themselves will prevail. People like that sort of thing. Formally, the series is also conventional. One looks in vain for camera angles or editing techniques that deviate from standard television fare. The dialogue remains staid, and the production design (three Ladas on the street, wood-paneled secret service offices) is reminiscent of the numerous bad German film comedies that have painted a distorted and superficial picture of the GDR over the past few years.

Which, of course, doesn't stop the reviewer in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine" from finding the series "terrific" and "refreshingly impetuous": "Shakespeare for today." The "Süddeutsche Zeitung" agrees: "perfectly equipped," "the most entertaining declaration of love to freedom and stubbornness in a long time." The second season is already in preparation: "It takes place in 1988 and, to a large extent, around the Berlin Wall; meanwhile, the corrupt KGB, which knows that socialist ideology has failed, is itself controlling the denim trafficking business" (FAZ). I'm so excited.

»Soviet Jeans«, now on Arte