In many ways, “Red Penguins” picks up where Polsky’s “Red Army” (2014) left off. There he charted the rise and fall of the eponymous Russian hockey team, its splintering and its players being dispersed to America and the NHL where they found a rougher, uglier game. In “Red Penguins”, on the other hand, American entrepreneurs go to a post-Communist Russia seeking to install a version of their preferred Capitalist Democracy, while self-servingly hoping to install a convenient pipeline to Russian hockey talent along the way, buying a half-share in the Red Army team and trying to turn into a thriving overseas business. The country they find, however, is not quite the one they expect, the cross-cultural divide comically and precisely laid out in the dueling reactions to the historical Moscow Ice Sports Palace housing a strip club in the basement and the subsequent crude marketing tactics enlisted by the yankee doodle businessmen. The Americans can’t believe a hockey rink would have a strip club; the Russians can’t believe the Americans would enlist the strippers as cheerleaders on the ice. In other words, how do you take your societal vulgarities: out in the open or behind closed doors? Strippers on the ice, though, proves a less extravagant stunt than bringing in a real-life bear to chug beer on the ice. The bear ends up biting off someone’s finger, half-bringing to life one of the most preposterous passages of the 2008 Will Ferrell comedy “Semi-Pro.” That’s pretty remarkable.
The American marketer leading this Russian charge is Steven Warshaw, a gregarious interview who has no trouble retelling every story, at one point stopping a story in the middle when, as a Jewish man, he wants to confirm certain Christian terminology, restarting the same story, word for word, with nary a prompt, like he’s been telling it all his life. He talks like the avaricious American Dream and is juxtaposed, astutely and humorously, against the Red Penguins’ general manager, Valery Gushin. Every horror story told by Warshaw about imposing Russian mafia, men with machine guns under their trenchcoats, or Gushin and his allies pilfering profits is met in an ensuing frame by Gushin cracking up, as if remembering the funniest thing that ever happened, as if he were Wayne Arnold recalling beating up little brother Kevin. If Warshaw has a small smile in these present-day passages, it is nevertheless the small, hesitant kind of smile, one of still lingering fear but also incredulity, like the world of the Red Penguins remains foreign to him. Near the end of the documentary he explains that the Russians never got it, though by this point it is clear that Warshaw is the one who never got it, not the way the Russians did business or lived life. “You want democracy?” asks Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov, the then-Central Red Army team President who looks during his entire interview like he is deciding whether or not to order Polsky be offed. “It will be our democracy.”
At one point, Warshaw remembers how Gushin installed a spy in his office. When Warshaw pressed Gushin on this he remembers being told “Don’t ask questions or you’ll be hanging from your thumbs at the top of the arena.” Polsky then cuts back to Gushin, being reminded of this warning, who erupts into laughter. He laughs and laughs, for a full minute, literally dabbing at tears that form from guffawing so hard. As he tries to calm himself, off-camera Polsky can be heard trying to pin him down about this and that, seeking to grasp Gushin’s motivation. Finally, Gushin quiets down and his nigh-omnipresent smile vanishes. He says, soberly: “We will decide everything ourselves.”
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