The Tusty’s film is at least partly tailor-made for an Estonian-American audience, but there’s enough context to make The Singing Revolution universally appealing. Briefly explaining the meaning of music within Estonian culture, especially the quinquennial song festival known as Laulupidu in Estonian; it was at the first of these, in 1869, that “Mu isamaa” was first sung. The Soviet authorities permitted the Laulupidu only erratically, but its infrequent appearances were enough to keep the Estonian nationalist spirit alive until the 1980s, when “Mu isamaa” became something between a shibboleth and a resistance movement: a means for Estonians to communicate with one another their love for country in the face of the Russian’s best efforts to wipe out anything but loyalty to Communism.
Most of the film is given over to the events of the 1980s, as recounted by several of the most important members of the Estonian resistance; attention is also given to the other Baltic states, Latvia and Lithuania, which formed anti-Soviet resistance movements around the same time, though in neither of those countries was the resistance primarily cultural and therefore non-violent, as it was in Estonia. Unfortunately missing in the Tusty’s hurry to arrive at the late ’60s, when the generation that ultimately freed the country was starting to come into being, is more context for the country’s modern history: the Soviet takeover and the early suffering imposed upon the Estonian people is dealt with in all of five minutes, while the whole two-year occupation by Nazi Germany is brushed aside in literally one sentence. Given how carefully the film presents its history elsewhere, this lack of detail is frustrating: a viewer not fully versed in 20th Century history is given the extravagantly nuanced argument that the Soviet Union did bad things because it was bad, with the scale and political reasons for the Stalinist atrocities left totally unexplained. Still, that’s not meant to be the film’s focus, and when it sticks to it’s primary theme – that a shared culture can bind together an oppressed people, and encourage them to rise against their oppressors – it’s a fantastic, instructive documentary about a recent historic period too willingly ignored by those on all sides of the expired Cold War.
The question of whether If I Were Dictator justifies that scope; now that’s a bit tricky. Basically, the film is about the musings of one man (played by Routt – rarely a good sign when the a hyphenate filmmaker’s tasks include the lead character, but in this case the protagonist is an obvious stand-in for the writer-director, so I’m inclinded to let it slide) who is sick and tired of all the problems, and thanks to a surprisingly simple invention he makes out of household wares – the object’s function is easy to guess, but Routt saves it for a twist ending, and I will honor this – he finds himself made dictator of America by a grateful populace. Or maybe dictator-to-be. This isn’t at all a plot-driven film, and as such the plot is a bit murky at places. In his cabinet office, surrounded by yes-men and toadies, the dictator starts to rattle off a list of the inconveniences of modern life, nearly all of them caused by people’s inconsiderate natrues, and proposes legislation to curtail the worst of human behavior.
That’s a fairly limiting concept for a feature, although it allows Routt to stretch what was doubtlessly a microscopic budget: the film plays out as a series of vignettes in nondescript locations, usually between two, three or four principals. By switching the action so quickly through such a large, essentially anonymous cast, the film creates the illusion of activity. Still, it’s hard to ignore the fact that not much happens here: we never find out whether the dictator’s laws are carried out as he desired, nor if they’re successful in achieving his goals. It might have been a decent idea to shorten the encycolopedic list of social ills in favor of actually following through. Barring that, it might have been an even better idea simply to make a short film, in which the single joke of the concept could have hit and been funny, without necessarily requiring any kind of sustained momentum.
That said, Routt’s skills behind the camera are estimable, given the limited means he had to make this film (although, like nearly every low-budget indie made in the last 15 years, If I Were Dictator suffers badly from inconsistent and often fuzzy sound). If this first feature seems more like a private joke – the kind of thing that absolutely kills at parties, where everyone in the room was either in the cast or on the crew – at least it indicates, unlike many such things, that the man responsible for it all knows what the hell he’s doing. Given a stronger idea for a script, Routt certainly has enough talent to make a name for himself out in the real world.