“Soviet jeans”, a funny and historically true series on love in the time of KGB

Latvia, 1979. He sells jeans at the black market, she defends progressive ideas on stage. But the USSR watches over … a miracle of romantic mini-series to discover on Arte.

IThey are beautiful, they are young, they kiss for the first time … Soviet Jeans Begins like any love Story. But in 1979, in Riga, we were not 20 years old as in Paris. Renars (Karlis Arnolds Avots), Latvian theater costume designer, flows from smuggling goods imported from the West, Marlboro packages, mixers made in Germany or Jeans Levis. Tina (Aamu Milonoff), director from Finland, defends her artistic choices in the face of pressures from communist officials.

Aerial, solar, the first episode of the miniseries of Stanislavs Tokalovs and Teodora Markova seized the intoxication of a love at first sight. Happy who forgets even a night surveillance of the diet … in the sight of husbands (IGors Selegovskis), zealot of the KGB and rival of Renars, the couple will soon be separated. And the horizon reduced to the four walls of a psychiatric hospital.

First Latvian production presented at the Mania series festival in 2024, Soviet Jeans had left with the prices of the public and the best actor. Just awards for this time trip, romantic and tragicomic, which restores the atmosphere then with an amazing vivacity. Its daring mixture of genres distinguished her, within a wave of series that seize the Soviet past. “We started working after the success of Chernobyl and Spy / Master, But we wanted to adopt a less dramatic approach, by placing a love story in the center ”, Confie Teodora Markova.

Fierce against authoritarianism

With its warm colors and its mobile camera, the series is freed from gravity of the historic story. If the decor of asylum evokes the film of Milos Forman Flight over a cuckoo nest (1975), Stanislavs Tokalovs, filmmaker whose Soviet Jeans is the first series, is rather claimed from the naturalism of the Dardenne brothers. Humor in addition. “For the characters, it is a means of survival. If you can make jokes, it’s because you’re still ready to fight. »»

Success in Latvia, and spearhead abroad of an embryonic local production, the series brought the generations closer, of the youngest, to whom it made it possible to better understand these years, to the veterans of the time, who praised its veracity. “Show characters who try to live the best possible life despite the circumstances seems more authentic to them than the exaggeratedly dark dramas than we usually see”, reports the director.

Make a psychiatric diagnosis for opponents

Based on the reality of the black market under the Soviet era, with jeans in a symbol of freedom, the series seems to want to scratch the capitalist illusion, for example when the wife of a doctor is hypnotized by his brand new television. “You have to understand that when you are deprived of everything, the slightest thing you have becomes a quasi-divinity”, relativise Stanislavs Tokalovs.

Especially fierce against authoritarianism, Soviet Jeans tells the transformation of psychiatric institutions in prisons. “The diet had made a diagnosis”schizophrenic trend with fixation on Western culture ” to enclose political opponents ”, explains Teodora Markova. A repressive sleight of hand that Vladimir Putin disastrously brought up to date in his country, recalls the creator of Soviet Jeans. Which makes it a duty not to sell his series to Russia: “It’s not time to entertain the Russian people. »»

Série créée for Stanislav Tovalovs . Avec Carl Arnold Avott, Aam Milonooff, Igor Selegovsky. Sur Art.tv.