TYCOON DEPICTS DARK FORCES THAT BROUGHT DOWN A RUSSIAN ECONOMIC OLIGARCH
Tycoon: A New Russian (in Russian the title is Oligarkh), directed by Pavel Lounguine, is a loose biopic about Russian billionaire and Kremlin fixer Boris A. Berezovky, whose cinematic embodiment is as Platon Makovski (played by Vladimir Mashkov). In a larger sense, the film is an exposé of the Russian economic system, where entrepreneurs dodge both bureaucrats and bullets. Told in the genre of Citizen Kane, the confusing story switches back and forth between his meteoric fifteen-year economic ascent and the five-day investigation after his death. Those familiar with how the official economy in the Soviet Union competed with the black market will not be mystified as Plato steers his avaricious compulsions over a transition from 1985 to 2000 (from Gorbachëv to Yelstin) while avoiding efforts of General Koretski (played by Alexandre Baluev), an agent of the Secret Service (successor to the KGB), to rein in his semilegal activities as his wife, Maria (played by Maria Mironova), has an affair with the playboy megacapitalist. Makovski starts by making brooms, then somehow trading brooms for motorcars, until he forms Infocar, a giant corporation. To do so, he first pays the state managers of Lada for their remaining inventory, and soon he imports cars from Western Europe, making so much money that he can buy a television station. When a few goons, presumably former employees of the auto factory, demand money for allowing the original purchase of Soviet autos, he becomes a "mob capitalist" by hiring a Uzbek who is in charge of an entire criminal syndicate of goons. To bypass the Customs Office, which solicits a bribe to allow auto imports to enter the Russian market, he buys the bank where customs fees are deposited. On the way up, Makovski rewards some of his fellow university students by awarding them key roles in his empire, but he makes enemies in both the private and public sectors as he tramples on economic fiefdoms, and his enemies in turn try to buy off some of his friends.