Leto review, Culture Whisper
There was a disquieting emptiness after the four-part documentary Punk concluded on Sky Arts. Every episode chronicling a specific period in punk rock, left an energetic spirit behind. The strums of the guitars, the beat of the drums, the screams of the singers inspired a world-shaking attitude that's hard to shake off.
Coming so soon after Punk’s absence, Kirill Serebrennikov’s fiction film Leto is far less straightforward: Russian, black-and-white, and experimental. Serebrennikov, recently freed from house arrest in Moscow, plunges into ‘80s Leningrad (now St Petersburg) where the underground punk scene was strumming and beating and screaming under the Soviet regime.
This affectionate milieu not only snaps a flavour of the time, place, and scene, but perfectly captures – in pictures and in music – that head-banging abandon felt when hearing a punk song.
