Russia, struggling still: PUSSY RIOT--A PUNK PRAYER makes its debut on HBO

Just last night, TrustMovies and his companion finally caught up with the five-year-old Russian movie-musical, Hipsters. (It's funny how an important film like this can escape one's attention even when one lives, breathes, eats and poops movies.) I'll have more to say about this marvelous film in a post to come soon. I am mentioning it now only because, like PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER -- the documentary about the now famous Russian musical/protest group under consideration here -- Hipsters, too deals with music as a form of protest in Russia. Were it to have been made today, its buoyant, amazing and deeply-felt finale would no doubt have included the young women of Pussy Riot.

You'll probably want to see this documentary, even if you have followed the Pussy Riot proceedings from their outset, when, in early 2012, members of the punk-rock collective staged a performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior to demonstrate against the unseemly closeness of the "dictator" (as they call him) Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Three members were eventually arrested and held without bail for months until their trial began. That's pretty much what I knew going into this documentary, and so I was interested in learning more. The film's directors, Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin (shown at right, with Mr. Lerner on the left) offer us a little bit of the group's history but stick closest to the three young women -- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (below, right), Maria Alyokhina (below, left) and Yekaterina Samutsevich (center) -- who were jailed. We learn something about them, their families, and their past performance art: "Kissing a Cop" looks like great fun (if surprising for the cops), while Nadezhda's earlier round of live sex performances should keep male members aroused. Eventually we even learn something of what these women think and believe.

I suspect that the filmmakers were somewhat cow-tied in terms of what was available to them. This is Putin's Russia, after all, where investigative journalists end up dead, and people whom the dictator (I fully agree with Ms Tolokonnikova's choice of words) does not like end up in prison on trumped-up charges, with judges who follow the dictator's line of thinking right into oblivion for the defendants. And while the film is nowhere as interesting or well-done as the recent documentary about another, much more famous Russian prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it will probably further cement your view of present-day Russia as a "gulag-lite" (as Khodorkovsky calls it) dictatorship.

By the end of the film, I suspect you'll feel generally good about, if sorry for, these three defendants and probably proud of them, too, particularly Ms Tolokonnikova, at left, whose final defense statement is a model of intelligence and dedication. The sentencing of these young women seems quite similar to that of one of America's recent young protesters: Tim DeChristopher, whose case was covered in last month's documentary Bidder 70. Which should make you wonder, once again, I am sure, how close Obama's America -- with its illegal drone killings, war on whistle-blowers and phone-tapping for everyone -- is coming to the Russian-style of government.

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, after debuting at this year's Sundance Film festival, makes its HBO debut this coming Monday, June 10, at 9pm. Consult HBO's schedule for further showings.