If you want to get something done in Bulgaria, you’ve got to repress any moral scruples you may have and learn to look people in the eye and say, “Yes, I can make that happen for you, but what do I get for my troubles?” Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov Black Money for White Nights is a film about an ambient level of corruption within Bulgarian society that has become the norm, particularly when it comes to circumventing things like hospital waiting lists or low-energy police investigations.
Marina (Tanya Shahova) and her husband Gosha (Ivan Savov) are on the cusp of retirement, and they’ve got a biscuit tin hiding in the fireplace filled with their ill-gotten gains. We join them at the point where they need just 85 more Bulgarian lev and they’ll have enough for Marina’s dream holiday to St Petersburg to see the White Nights. Station manager Gosha takes them to their financial target by allowing bootleggers to siphon diesel from stationary trains for a cash-in-hand bribe, and so the pair head to the literally back-ally travel agent, Dream Tourism, to pay for their trip in cash. Fuelled by 30 years of pent-up excitement, no rats are smelt.
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One small snag in their masterplan: Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and perhaps this isn’t the best time – culturally, logistically, morally – to head over there. Yet after the fine folks at Dream Tourism give Marina and Gosha the all clear, so the pair pack their leather jackets, muslin smocks and spare toilet paper and head towards the blissful break they’ve toiled so hard for. And it doesn’t go well for them at all.
Grozeva and Valchanov empathise with their ultra-naïve heroes, despite the fact that they seem prone to making awful decisions. The unofficial barter system that exists under capitalism, into which they have been subsumed, has given them a false sense of security, and when they are the ones who are in need they finally see that it’s just all exploitation all of the time. Initially, they can’t quite understand how the system that they have spent so long propping up has come back to bite them on the ass, but it ends up causing more than just short-term ire. It leads to a crisis which forces the apparently cosy couple to rake up past secrets and lies, as well as revealing the reason for Mariana’s long-held romantic obsession with Russia.
The film takes an intriguing scenario and spins it out in a number ways – some, admittedly, more successful than others. Mariana is led to question her faith and believes she is the recipient of divine punishment for her own involvement in workplace back-handers, but organised religion is another strangely oblique system which she is less inclined to question. Gosha, meanwhile, has to deal with a tarnished male ego when his attempts to retrieve some of the cash that the pair lost lead him to another dodgy dealer in another back room.
Aside from some dryly humorous cause/effect edits, the formal aspirations here are fairly limited. And the film doesn’t quite manage to thread the needle between societal rot and marital rot that it’s clearly aiming for, as the final third does meander towards more mundane domestic concerns. But the vivid characters and their shared history does shine through in the two central performances, and it’s a story that definitely asks you to take stock of the world before handing over 10,000k in ziplock bags to someone who may not have your best interests at heart.
