Summaries

Synopsis

An ardent Rock and roll fan Renars Rubiens (Karlis Arnolds Avots), is a tailor in the Riga Theater and is forced by his high school classmate KGB Lieutenant Maris Tackteris (Igors Selegovskis) to spy on his fellow workers, though he gives up noting of value to the spooks. It is 1984 and he manages to trade various Soviet goods with tourists which he shares with gym teacher Apolinarits (Gints Gravelis) & Apolo's girlfriend Raisa (Varvara Chekus). Renars saves lots of his money sewn into his mattress at the house he shares with his grandmother Daiga (Indra Brike), hero of the great war. After escaping the police, he notices a new attractive young woman and offers to buy her jeans from her. She teases him asking if he wants to take them off of her, but when he assures her that it is not his intention, she walks away. Later, he is at the theater when the new Finish director, Tina Heikkinin (Aamu Milonoff) is introduced by the elderly theater director Kanape (Juris Bartkevics) as a guest artist there to put on a six week run of Hamlet. He has already caught her intention when asking about her Levis, and he catches it again when he warns her about the microphones and surveillance of the KGB handlers who have been assigned to track her every move. He induces her to follow him outside and they escape her tail. They end up on the beach and later in his bed, where she wakes up to his grandmother asking what she wants in her coffee. Meanwhile Maris is putting pressure on Renars to produce some intelligence, because he is getting pressure from his boss, Colonel Andrey Aloizovich Berzins (Juris Lisners): 'After all the Finns must be doing something against the Soviet state.' When the Colonel tells Maris to have his tailor get close to Tina, Maris offers to do it himself, but is quickly overruled. When Renars gets his assignment to spy on Tina he tries to get out of it, but then tells her that he has been ordered by the KGB to watch her. She discovers that he has access to illegal goods, and finally shares that she has brought some banned political books with her into Riga to distribute, not for money as he does, but for her values. When she gets a note telling her where to deliver the goods, she asks him to go with her. But the night before she pulls him into a cast party, and pushes him to sing a song after getting him drunk. He makes up verses that skewer Maris, but does not know that someone in the sound booth is putting all of his verses on cassette tape, which has been delivered the KGB, or that Maris is humiliated among his fellow officers when his boss plays the tape for all of them. Renars accompanies Maris to the park where she was told to drop the illicit books, but he notices several Soviet agents, and warns her away from danger. He suggests that he take the books for safe keeping, and hides them. As he returns to the theater on his bicycle, he is interrupted by two men in an ambulance, drugged and taken in to a psychiatric hospital #4. As he is waking, Renars is brought before the Hospital staff, where he protests that there has been some mistake. When he tries to walk out, they take his behavior as resisting authority and hold him over for a week of evaluation, before they knock him out with an injection. When he wakes from that injection one of his room mates Vilis Karnis (Ivars Krasts) offers some salt to help with the side effects of the drugs, an gives Renars three rules for survival - Get a job in the hospital tailor shop, avoid Doctor Fiodorovs (Valentin Novopolskij) and find a way to avoid swallowing any of the medications that the staff gives him. His first work assignment is cleaning bathrooms, where he starts a conversation with Doctor Strautmanis (Andris Keiss), who runs the hospital including the sewing shop which has a steep quota for making children's uniforms. Renars claims that he is a tailor, who can cut and sew a pair of men's pants in less than an hour. After he proves this, to the head doctor and shop foreman Guntis (Dainis Gaidelis), Renars offers to sew a pair of denim jeans for the doctor's wife. When the Doctor takes him up on the offer Renars instructs Strautmanis to look up Apolinarits for the denim, and to pick up a West German made hand mixer for Strautmanis' wife (Olga Kuznelova) as well. Meanwhile, when Tina asks Maris what happened to Renars, she is told that he defected to the west, like his mother had years before. When she checks with Daiga, the old woman is unconvinced, but Apolinarits cannot say for sure. Laying down in Renars bedroom, Tina notices a pin in his bed sheet, and then feels underneath it to notice a hard lump. She investigates and finds a wad of Foreign currency. She calls Apolinarits into the room to tell him that no one would leave the money he needs behind when escaping to the west. When Doctor Strautmanis makes contact with Apolinarits, he sends a colleague after him when they have exchanged the 50% down payment for the denim and mixer. Apolinarits is able to report back to Tina that Renars has been located in psychiatric hospital #4. Meanwhile Renars is able to persuade Doctor Strautmanis and his shop foreman Guntis to set up an underground jeans factory in the psychiatric hospital, making knock off Levis and enlists his roommates from ward 6, including Vilis, Professors (Gunsars Abolins), Maniaks (Javgenijs Isajevs), Bebel (Nikolay Shestak) and Fisers (Janis Jarans). Then one night one of the 8 pairs is missing, and the music obsessed patient Bebel shows up the next day wearing them. Renars is convinced that one of his colleagues in the workshop hid them and Babel found them, but can get no one to own up to the theft. Meanwhile Doctor Strautmanis, Doctor Fiodorovs and head nurse Olga Akamatova (Evgenia Gladiy) are interrogating Bebel in front of the staff, but the patient is going on and on about Robert Palmer and Led Zeppelin, without saying where the Jeans came from. Finally Fiodorovs dismisses him, arranging for electroshock, and Strautmanis calls a staff meeting, where he surmises that one of the staff must have worn the Jeans into the hospital, and checks out the size of the pair that matches about 6 male employees including Fiodorovs. He then calls the prisoners together outside, and after no one confesses, he orders the jeans to be burnt. Apolo is called to a meeting with his buyer, Uncle Tavocis Mitja (Timur Ibraimov), who shows him that all 20 pairs have right leg cut 2 centimeters shorter than the left, and demands replacing them with all new jeans. Mitja will be in Riga for three days, and Apolinarits tells him that he will find a fix, even though he does not have the denim to make that many quickly. When the jeans start showing up at the dance school on teen dancers, Agent Tanya Tulkotaja (Marta Grase) tries to report it to Maris, who shuts her down. Later the Colonel reassigns the task of interviewing young women to Tulkotaja, taking Maris out of that loop. So to find the source of these Levi jeans, Maris contacts his former colleague Olegs (Volodymr Gorislavets) to impersonate a cop and the two go to hospital #4 to get Renars out. Renars still believes that Maris wants to help, so he agrees to have Olegs present himself as a buyer from out of town, looking for jeans. Renars takes Olegs to the park where Apolinarits moves much of his contraband goods, and manages to have a side conversation with Apolinarits while someone else keeps Olegs busy. Tina, who is dealing with interference from the head of the Theater, comes to the park to clear her head, and notices Renars with Olegs. When the two walk away after she catches Renars eye, she demands to know what is going on from Apolinarits, who tells her that they all are in trouble. But he also tells her the meeting spot the next night, warning her to stay away and say nothing if she is there. The next night Apolo's girlfriend Risa in a blond wig does the negotiating with Olegs, as Apolinarits watches. While Risa is away checking on things, Olegs shares the take of the folk song tape that has everyone in the KGB office laughing at Maris, and when asked what happened to the singer, Olegs says that Maris had the guy put away. Feeling sick, Renars goes to the bathroom, and is met by Apolinarits, who learns that Renars is ready to leave the country when Renars asks for the keys to Apolo's car, saying that he cannot go back to the nut house that Maris put him in. Back in the bar, as Olegs settles up the bill for the drinks, Risa slips the car keys to Renars, and then spills some drinks on Olegs to give Renars a chance to get away. He grabs Tina on the way out the door. They are seen as the drive away, so after a half hour, near the sea, Renars decides to turn around and have Tina take the car back to Apolinarits. Before Olegs starts to track down the white car, and identify the girl that he saw with Renars, Maris and he see Renars walk in bragging about the hot date he had with a girl who he knew from years ago. But now he needs a guarantee that he will get out of the mental hospital if he finds the source of the jeans. The next day, Apolinarits meets with Tavocis Mitja and is forced to agree to deliver 60 pairs of jeans to Moscow for the price that Tavocis Mitja already paid. Maris arranges a sting at the dance school, for a guy in blue jeans who is supposed to deliver a bundle of Jeans. When the guy comes, he seems surprised that the officer wants the bundle, instead of letting him deliver it to the teachers. When he is arrested, he drops the bundle, which contains only dance costumes for younger girls, and once again Maris feels like a fool. Before Renars returns to the hospital, where he greets his fellow ward mates, Strautmanis has approached Vilis, proposing that he lead the jeans production line because Renars will be going away, perhaps pulling strings to get out. Vilis starts to sulk when Renars returns to his old position running the tailor shop each night. and no longer helps when Doctor Fiodorovs puts Renars on a new medication that has him hallucinating. During this time, Renars notices Vilis drawing in a secret notebook. Maris starts to track down a white Zhiguli car, while Apolinarits and Augusts (Gatis Gaga) are repainting his car green. Raisa leaves Apolinarits when she learns that he is planning to drive 20 pairs of Jeans to Moscow, coming to Daiga 's home to talk to her grandmother Jakaterina Alekseyevna (Natalija Bastina), to complain. Soon both grandmothers show up at Jakaterina's god son's warehouse to tell Apolinarits that they, not he are going to take the 20 pairs of jeans to Moscow. He has to tell them that they are delivering 60 pairs in 4 suitcases by train. Maris learns that he has been put under the supervision of Tanya Tulkotaja on the Jeans investigation, because she has found that the rivets used to make them come from the Riga area. When the two grandmothers board the train, one of Jakaterina's suit cases opens up when the conductress helps her put in in the rack above the seat, and both women and all sixty jeans are confiscated. In the tailor workshop each night the others following the sulking Vilis start to complain about Renars getting special treatment, and start to slack off. Renars is pulled into a piss break by Guntis so he can talk with Doctor Strautmanis, who promises to get some music and alcohol to brighten the spirits of the crew. They have a blowout orgy, while Vilis excuses himself, to masturbate to his drawings of naked men. Even Guntis joins the party, and gets drunk enough to share that he has followed Nurse Olga Akamatova to this hospital. They all wake up drunk the next morning in the shop, except for Vilis, who is there when nurse Akamatova comes to get the men of ward 6 up. The camera crews from local television led by the chairman of the hospital executive committee Kuldus have arrived to show off the tailoring workshop. Renars wakes to find all the others drunk beside him in the workshop, and rushes to get them together and working. By the time that Strautmanis, Kuldus and the camera crew arrive all are working on the uniforms. Doctor Fiodorovs complains that they are still in the shop, and not in their beds as required by regulations, and when Fiodorovs finds a guitar behind a door, the Professor says that they have been working on a new song in praise of Lenin, and Brezhnev, and need time to rehearse. Renars creates a song of praise on the spot, as the others play along, and Kuldus decides to take the tailor crew outside to celebrate the hospital with all of the staff and patients. At this point Maris arrives to see how the special treatment that he has ordered for Renars is going, but when he pulls Renars aside to punch him several times, Vilis knocks the KGB Lieutenant down and joins the rest of the tailors in their performance. Maris then learns from Fiodorovs that the hospital has a tailoring shop. With this information, Maris puts pressure on Fiodorovs to find evidence of jeans on the hospital grounds, given that Fiodorovs reports that Doctor Strautmanis had the other pair burnt. Maris continues his investigations long into the night, withholding this information from Tanya Tulkotaja who now is heading the investigation. Instead he complies when she orders him to accompany her when she and the KGB investigating team plan a raid in the park. They spot the kid in a tan jacket who they had found with jeans knowing that he has to go back for more, and watch as he meets with Augusts. When the kid demands the jeans, Augusts explains that he is only going to take his money, and the Jeans will be delivered later, then senses that there is a raid, and tells the kid to run. The KGB agents get the kid in the tan jacket, but Augusts escapes, and later Tanya tells Maris that he was right to tell her to wait until the jeans appeared before starting the raid, as she has been able to get nothing from the kid. Meanwhile Apolinarits has told Doctor Strautmanis that they have to deliver 100 pairs of jeans that week, or else Uncle Mitja will come and pull the Doctor's house apart, and they are not going to get paid for any of them because 30 pairs were defective, with one leg two centimeters short. Shortly afterward, Tina arrives at Apolinarits warehouse to drop off three bags of rivets, one of which breaks spilling all over the floor. She then goes back to rehearse, but calls Maris to ask him to take her to the sea, to help alleviate the pressure she feels from Kanape to change the play. While they are at the private beach reserved for the KGB, she resists Maris efforts to hold her down and kiss her, but this gives Augusts enough time to deliver the denim needed for that week's production. Renars has a near revolt on his hands when he demands that his crew up their rate to 100 for the week. They had never done more that 30, and even with Vilis back full time, the others are too tired and screwing up. Renars holds them over for an extended overnight shift, before they have to leave for their exercise class under nurse Olga Akamatova. Doctor Fiodorovs has been watching the tailor shop, waiting to get in after the crew leaves to find the jeans. He investigates carefully, but as he is about to leave, he notices some closed bins next to the light switch, and finds pairs of jeans inside, sitting on top of the rolls of denim. He relays this information to Maris who starts to formulate a plan for a raid. The night before the raid, Maris visits the set of the theater, just after the chief censor Nadezda Androyevna (Tatjana Lokasenkova) had reviewed the dress rehearsal, and told Tina that the play would have to be dropped. Tina had finally agreed to every change that the censor and Kanape had demanded, so she could stay on for the premier. Maris tells Tina that this was a wise decision, because he never believed that the play as she envisioned it would be acceptable, but he also apologizes for his behavior on the beach. When Tina accepts his apology, he asks her to put it writing. As she pulls a pad of paper from her jacket pocket, a rivet falls onto the floor of the stage. Stunned he notices, but says nothing when Tina picks it up and puts it back in her pocket. Afterward, she tries to call Apolinarits, but he is busy with coaching the girls gymnastic class, so she walks over to the office. Meanwhile Maris goes back to the KGB office and checks the rivets that Tanya had found to be sourced from Riga for the jeans, finding a match. He then gets the call from Fiodorovs reporting that he has found the jeans in the workshop. Maris organizes a raid with 5 KGB agents, but Tanya insists on knowing what is happening and tells him hat she is going along. When Tina pulls Apolinarits out of his class, she tells him about the rivet and that they need to warn Renars. He tries to call Doctor Strautmanis at his office, but gets no answer. Then he tries to get the doctor at home, but Strautmanis' wife takes the call in the middle of a television program and forgets to tell her husband about it when he come in a few minutes later. When the program ends, she takes her husband to bed, but remembers to tell him when the phone rings again. Meanwhile, Tina tells Apolinarits and Augusts that she is going to the hospital to warn Renars. Apolinarits gives her s detailed plan to take a taxi, and deliver three carnations to her uncle Guntis, along with a bottle of alcohol to bribe the guard to leave the gate and deliver them. She does as she is told, and the carnations are delivered to Guntis, for his birthday, even though it is not his birthday. When he shows them to the tailors, Renars immediately recognizes the message, and has all of the others stop sewing jeans, hide all of the materials, and set up to be working on the school uniforms, just before the KGB arrives. Maris, Tanya, Olegs and other agents search, but they find no sign of jeans. As they leave the workshop, they are confronted by nurse Olga Akamatova who is complaining to the just arrived Doctor Strautmanis about the KGB turning the whole hospital upside down and annoying the patients. When Guntis indicates that everything is good in the workshop, Doctor Strautmanis starts to protest the intrusion to Maris and Tanya, but Maris demands that they continue their investigation, holding all of the tailors in their ward 6, and interrogating each one in turn. As Tina watches this drama from outside the hospital grounds, Augusts appears behind her to take her away. In ward 6, Professors and Fisers are freaking out, both ready to confess whatever they have been doing. Renars tries to calm them down, but when that does not stop Fisers from calling for the orderlies, Renars knocks the older man down with a punch to the eye, which turns both Professors and Maniaks against him. After a day of searching and abuse of the inmates. Without finding any signs of the jeans, Tanya order the KGB crew to return to their office in Riga, but Maris and many of the agents refuse, staying on to interrogate the inmates from Ward 6. No one breaks during that round of questioning, but Maris notes that Fisers with his black eye is hesitant until he looks at Doctor Strautmanis. The Doctor is then questioned, and afterward he starts to plot a way to shift the blame to Fiodorovs, calling his wife to pack up all of the western goods like the television, her electric mixer and especially her jeans from their home, and put it in their car. Maris then starts to assert to Renars that it was Tina who gave him information about the jeans operation, like where they got the rivets and the denim, in exchange for having her play shown in Moscow. Vilis is still looking for who gave them up to bring down the KGB raid, but Renars tells him that whoever squealed must have been from the outside, because Maris knows too much about the whole operation outside of the hospital. In fact, after the final dress rehearsal which incorporates all of the changes required by Nadezda Androyevna and Kanape, the whole cast is told that they are now going to Moscow after their premier in Riga. Apolinarits who tried to convince Tina to leave before she got arrested, with no success ,now reconciles with Raisa and convinces her to take the payment to Uncle Tavocis Mitja in Moscow, and leaves her on a train where she is to seduce the man in her train compartment. When Bebel dies of repeated electroshock treatments administered by Fiodorovs, Doctor Strautmanis again claims that it was Fiodorovs, who killed the only witness against him, but Maris tells both doctors that they are under suspicion. Maris chooses Fisers to load Bebel's corpse into the ambulance, and then follows the old man to the bathroom to induce him to tell where the jeans are. Meanwhile, Doctor Strautmanis has secreted himself in the ambulance and manages to get off the hospital grounds along with Bebel. Renars and Vilis watch from their window in Ward 6 as Maris and his agents uncover the jeans in the compost pile outside of the workshop. As the KGB agents including Olegs pack up the evidence Doctor Strautmanis arrives home to the hastily packed car and drives his son and wife to a bus stop, telling her to meet him at his mother's house in the country. He then drives away furtively, until he is stopped by a police car at a country intersection. When the cop approaches him, Strautmanis drives away, with the police car chasing him. He loses control and crashes into a tree, which puts him in a coma while the contraband goods are strewn across the field. Just as Olegs and Maris prepare to leave, Chairman Kuldus arrives demanding to know why they are interfering with his prized workshop, but he is detained in his car for questioning. Apolinarits and Augusts are busy gathering up all of the contraband goods in the warehouse, and Augusts later sells the lot, including the repainted green car to another smuggler. As he walks across the park, Vanya (Henrijis Arajs) catches up to him and tells him that he heard about Renars being held as the person who made the jeans. Vanya does not reply, but tells the fence to disappear lest they get caught together. Meanwhile Chairman Kuldus is having a discussion with his cameraman, and tells him that he is going to write an article about how the former hero of the state was running a contraband jeans factory in the hospital. After some persuasion the news article comes out blaming the illegal activity on Renars, and celebrating the hospital staff for stopping it. This article distresses Colonel Berzins, Maris and Tanya, even more so because stencils praising Renars are starting to be painted at night on various government buildings. Berzins and Maris set a trap, both Renars and Tina are called to the phone where they discover each other on the line, that Maris is listening in on. Each of the lovers are cautious, but Renars learns that Tina delivered the carnations when he asks if she really had ratted the factory out to Maris. She tells her lover that she is in this for the long haul, though Renars doubts that he will ever be permitted to see her again. Afterward, in private conversations Maris asks Renars to become a model citizen, giving talks about being a good communist to meetings of the Komsomol, or party youth. While Renars is weighing this, Maris gives Tina the opportunity to see Renars again, if she will join Maris for some affection in his car. Both take the bait, with Renars debriefing with his grandmother Daiga, who tells him that she has been pretending for years as a hero of the great war. When they meet, in a cemetery under the distant watch of Maris, Tina realizes that this arrangement cannot work, that she fell in love with Renars because he had a spark that was otherwise missing in this gray country. Though she is physically close, she tells Renars that she is going back to Finland. At a radio interview that afternoon, Renars praises the work of the KGB and especially Maris Tackteris, then prepares to deliver a talk at a music festival in the park the next day. Using the picture from the stencil of Renars, Daiga approaches Apolinarits to ask for help making posters and getting out the word to everyone wearing new jeans in Riga that they were made by Renars. At the concert, Renars starts by praising Lieutenant Tackteris for putting him in the mental hospital, where he learned that he had always been living in a prison, because like all of the people in the crowd they were living in a prison called the USSR. Maris and his agents manage to stop that speech, but not before it ignites a riot, that leads to the concert being shut down. As the cast of Hamlet sit backstage, theater director Kanape urges them to go on stage to meet the high officials there for the debut performance, but they all refuse to go on without the director. Tina is on a train to Finland, and will not be coming back. When Renars arrives back at the hospital, he learns that Doctor Fiodorovs is now the hospital director, because Doctor Strautmanis has been in a coma since his auto accident. His intake is swift, and Renars is given electroshock. After taking a phone call about the riot at the concert, a shaken Berzins tells Maris, that he will be burying him so deep that he will never get another job in the whole Soviet Union, then goes into cardiac arrest. Maris waits until he dies, before getting the pills for the Colonel, then calls Berzins' secretary. Later the patients remaining in Ward 6 learn that Renars is back, and Vitis gets the keys to the head office. When he learns that the concert was canceled, Vitis sneaks out after hours to the head office, where he hooks up the radio to the hospital loud speakers. He then tunes it to a forbidden station on the air, that describes the concert and the riot and the abbreviated speech by Renars, before breaking the key in the lock and slipping back to his ward. This wakes the whole hospital, including Renars, who manages to untie the rope holding him in the electroshock bed, as all of his ward mates, except Fisers celebrate.