NOT a film about fans of north Belfast football club Cliftonville, Red Army is in fact a brilliant documentary on the Russian ice hockey team who became world-famous during the Cold War.
This endlessly entertaining film starts with newsreel footage of US President Ronald Reagan warning of the threat posed by the USSR, before we see how the Soviet 'Red Army’ ice hockey team dominated the sport from the late 70s to the early 90s.
At the heart of the story is Viacheslav 'Slava’ Fetisov, the leader of that team. He is a fascinating interviewee and is hilariously rude at one point, holding up his phone and staring at it and telling film-maker Gabe Polsky “I’m busy now”. Later on he tells Polsky, with a laugh, “You guys are used to doing nothing over there in America.”
The footage of Fetisov in ice hockey action in the 80s shows how supremely gifted he was as a player. There is a beautiful dance-like artistry to the way he and his team-mates move around and pass during matches, so it’s no surprise to learn that their first coach Anatoli Tarasov studied the Bolshoi Ballet dancers as part of his coaching regime.
The film gives a fascinating insight into life in the USSR, where most of the players grew up in poverty and joined the military-run ice hockey set-up, training in camps for 11 months of the year.
We get to see footage of kids singing the team song, featuring the lines `Real men play hockey/ Cowards don’t play hockey’ and also bizarre footage of bears playing in ice skates.
The Red Army played as a unit and the Soviet government wanted to use the team’s success to show the world that socialism worked. The team lost to the USA in the 1980 Winter Olympics, coach Tarasov was replaced by the dictatorial Viktor Tikhonov and the story gets more and more interesting.
We see the highs of their wins at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics; the 8-1 trouncing of Canada; how the 'Russian Five’ – Fetisov, Kasatonov, Makarov, Larionov and Krutov – became `the greatest five-man unit of all time’; and how the demise of the USSR led to the North American big-money NHL teams tempting the Russian players to join their ranks.
Fetisov eventually joined the New Jersey Devils, yet he and his wife felt marginalised in the US and he didn’t like the lack of artistry in the way the team played. “No style,” he says.
Then we have his on-off friendship with Kasatonov, his controversial decision to quit the Red Army team and his work as a Minister for Sport in Putin’s Russia.
A slick slice of film-making – puck of the week.
:: Red Army opens at QFT Belfast today and runs until Tuesday (QueensFilmTheatre.com).
RED ARMY
(15, 84mins) Documentary
Director: Gabe Polsky
Viacheslav Fetisov, Scotty Bowman, Mark Deakins (voice), Vladimir Krutov, Alexei Kasatonov, Anatoli Karpov, Ken Kurtis (voice)
FOUR STARS
