The female variable—the most volatile variable in life

Дзифт (Zift) 2008 Bulgaria (94 minutes) directed by Javor Gardev; screenplay and original novel by Vladislav Todorov.

The year is 1943 and the war is far away from Yuchbunar, a hardscrabble quarter of Sofia, Bulgaria, where tender young toughs with exuberantly obscene tattoos chew road asphalt they call ‘zift’ and wax philosophical. 

Zift, shot in black and white, looks like the result of mixing a Bulgarian writer well versed in American pulp detective fiction with a Bulgarian director who knows his classic film noir, Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie. These elements soak like olives in a kind of sweet naiveté lost long-ago in the West.

Boy meets girl. A pregnancy ensues, requiring an apartment and a job. The ‘job’ involves the boy, the girl, and an older male accomplice robbing a Russian Tsarist émigré who has an African statue with a large diamond concealed in its erect, screw-off phallus. The team botches the robbery; the male accomplice kills the victim and the boy takes the fall for the murder.

Twenty years later, released early from prison for having introduced ‘communist enlightenment into prison life,’ the boy—Lev Kaludov Zheliazkov, known as ‘Molets’ [Moth] (Zakhari Bakharov)—is met at the prison gate by minions of his former male accomplice—‘Pluzheka’ [Slug] (Vladimir Penev)—now a major in state security, convinced that Molets knows where the diamond is and determined to get it.   

Pluzheka first tortures, and then poisons Molets, leaving him less than twenty four hours to uncover the secret. Molets needs the antidote but seeks salvation.

In the background flutters lovely femme fatale Ada (Tanya Ilieva), Molets’ wife and the mother of the son he never saw, whom Molets nicknamed ‘Bogomolka’ [Praying Mantis]. Ada vamps as ‘Gilda’ at the Luna Nightclub. She may be in league with Pluzheka. She likes having sex with Molets. She waits to see who will come out on top.

‘The most volatile variable in life—the female variable,’ Molets observes, more as color commentator than direct participant.

Vladislav Todorov, who wrote the screenplay and novel on which it is based, said in an interview that he intended Zift to be an homage to James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). It seems an easier fit and more natural heir to Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

The fun part of this movie is watching a tall tale get taller as this madcap romp hurtles forward and various people share their crackpot stories and theories, vamp, belch, ignite farts, and show off their crazy tattoos along the way in the context of so-called Really-Existing Socialism.

‘For the soul, the eyes are like peas under a princess’ mattress. They don’t let her rest,’ the one-eyed philosopher Van Vurst-Okoto [Van Wurst the Eye] (Mikhail Mutafov) tells Molets, his prison cell mate.

The tattoos must be seen to be believed. Among other things, Molets has the insides of a woman’s legs tattooed from his upper inner arm to his chest, centered on the hair in his underarm, causing the image to spread her legs when he extends his left arm, such as placing his hand pensively behind his neck.

An acquaintance, Raycho Kozhata ‘The Skin’ (Yosif Shamli), has a clearly recognizable foot-high Disney Snow White centered on his upper back. Her bulbous breasts spill over her dindl, and she is surrounded by seven circle-jerking dwarves.

‘When Raycho got Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs tattooed on his back, he won the respect of all the kids in the ‘hood,’ Molets says.

Near the end, when Molets arrives at club where Ada works, he sizes up the bar as well as ever Spillane’s Mike Hammer did: ‘The bar looks dejected, idle, extramarital.’

Sitting down at the bar, Molets says to no one in particular that ‘a book called Candide...asks what is the human thing to do: to drift around the world with no direction or goal and be raped by a bunch of vulgarian Bulgarians, or to sit down on your warm butt in life’s flower bed?’

            A middle-aged woman at the bar (Boika Velkova) replies with a raspy voice: ‘You don’t get to choose. Man squats down in life’s flower bed anyway, but only after he’s been raped by a bunch of vulgarian Bulgarians.’ She punctuates this aperçu with a raucous laugh.

Loudspeakers broadcast patriotic music and an authoritative voice (Marian Marinov) regularly enunciates the time, an echo from the country’s communist past, as Molets’ time runs down. But where is the diamond? The characters’ best consolation seems to be, the deeper the shit, the less the moral damage.

The secret is in the street grit.