THE STORY – An older Bulgarian couple have learned how to work the angles in a society where nearly everyone seems to be on the take. But when a dream vacation to Russia takes an unexpected turn, the small-time operators suddenly find themselves entangled in a scheme with a small fortune at stake.
THE CAST – Ivan Savov, Tanya Shahova, Margita Gosheva & Ivan Barnev
THE TEAM – Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov (Directors), Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov & Decho Taralezhkov (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 94 Minutes
As authoritarian regimes pop up around the world, political corruption has come to the fore. In the current elections in the United States, for example, using one’s elected position for personal gain has been seen as an enormous net negative. In Bulgaria, however, taking money under the table for routine services is seen as just another Tuesday.
Meet Gosha (Ivan Savov) and Marina (Tanya Shahova), a longtime married couple who live in Sofia. Gosha works as a railway dispatcher who pads his pockets by turning a blind eye to thieves who siphon diesel fuel from tankers at the station. For her part, Marina, a maternity nurse, regularly accepts “gratuities” from nervous parents-to-be in exchange for preferential treatment. At the end of every workday, they pool their newfound income into a jar to fund their every desire.
For Marina, one of those long-held desires is to fund a dream vacation to see the white nights in Russia. Gosha, anxious to please his wife, agrees, so they meet with a travel agent, who lays out a promising itinerary. There’s a discount if the trip is paid for in cash up front, so, despite Marina’s misgivings, Gosha forks over their savings for a ticket set for months in advance. Even when Russia invades Ukraine, the travel agent assures them that all will be fine.
The day of their departure, however, is anything but fine. When their bus to the airport never arrives, Gosha marches to the travel agency, only to find the agency gone, along with all of their money. With nowhere to turn, Marina must swallow her pride and phone her resentful sister Lyudmila (Margita Gosheva) and her cabbie husband Kosyo (Ivan Barnev) for help. While Lyudmila is still griping to her sister over a long-unpaid debt, Kosyo offers to help a vengeful Gosha track down the scammers and get their money back. However, Kosyo hooks him up with a notorious underground gangster, a decision that Gosha soon regrets when it leads to brutally painful consequences.
There is, of course, a certain delicious irony in seeing those who take bribes getting scammed themselves. But it’s much to the credit of directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov that they never laugh at the expense of their bedeviled characters. Instead, the film shows empathy and an understanding that they’re only part of a corrupt system, and that to keep their household (and marriage) afloat, Gosha & Marina must go along with it.
None of this would have worked if the audience didn’t believe in the inherent goodness of Gosha and Marina’s lasting love for one another, and much of the credit goes to the chemistry between Savov and Shahova. Both their physical and verbal interactions suggest two people who have been together long enough to know each other’s moves and finish each other’s sentences. As unlikely as it may sound, they truly make us care that these two swindlers will both turn out all right.
The film moves briskly, thanks to the editing of Yorgos Mavropsaridis, the longtime Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator who cuts right on the beat, allowing the film’s many jokes to land solidly. In addition, much of DP Alexander Stanishev’s cinematography has an almost doc-like look, especially early in the film, as his hand-held camera follows the couple as they wander aimlessly amid what looks like a genuine gay pride celebration in Sofia. Most importantly, the screenplay by both the directors and co-writer Decho Taralezhkov is sharp, succinctly arguing that institutionalized corruption can filter down and threaten to ruin the everyday lives of citizens.
But an unpleasant cruelty lurks just beneath the surface, occasionally seeping through. True, it’s rooted in narrative, Marina believing that the couple has been cursed by God for breaking a crucifix and deserves all the punishment that they get. But the brutality of that retribution that the film’s elderly characters must endure, such as a physical beating that nearly costs Gosha his life, comes as a jolt and is at times an uncomfortable fit with the film’s otherwise satiric tone.
Directors Grozeva and Valchanov have bitten off a lot by attempting to indict an entire society’s practices with a single film. But they take a perceptive route: they start small, telling what’s essentially a story about one marriage; when the narrative broadens, and we see where these two small-timers fit into the larger map of corruption, it hits us harder. Even with its imperfections, “Black Money for White Nights” offers a stark warning that turning a blind eye to corruption can cause enormous rot not only in the soul of a nation but even down to its lowliest citizens.
