The very existence of a movie like You and I is completely baffling. It's a Russian production inspired by the music of faux-lesbian Russian pop duo t.A.T.u., directed by British Oscar nominee Roland Joffé, based on a novel by a Russian politician and starring American actors Mischa Barton, Shantel VanSanten and Anton Yelchin. Shot in 2007, it premiered at the Cannes Film Market in 2008 and finally makes its way direct to DVD in the U.S. in 2012, at least five years since anyone here has cared about the disposable music and fabricated image of t.A.T.u.
Movies like this are generally either glorious train wrecks or tedious wastes of time, and sadly You and I is mostly the latter. Joffé and the actors play things straight, taking seriously the story of two teenagers, Russian Lana (Barton) and American Janie (VanSanten), who fall in love thanks to their mutual love of t.A.T.u. Aspiring model Lana lives in the small town of Gorsk and dreams of making it Moscow, where expatriate Janie is stuck living with her overbearing stepmother in a giant apartment. The two girls meet on a t.A.T.u. fan website and make a plan to get together for the band's concert in Moscow.
The movie takes for granted that the members of t.A.T.u., whose supposed same-sex relationship was an invention of their manager, are the most amazing and inspiring musicians in the world, and that writing a song for them would solve all of Lana and Janie's problems. Those problems include a burgeoning drug habit for Janie and the unwelcome advances of a modeling impresario (Yelchin) for Lana, and that's just the start. Before too long, Janie ends up homeless (kicked out by her evil stepmother) and shooting up in an abandoned warehouse, while Lana somehow finds herself in prison after angering the powerful father of her dopey admirer from Gorsk.
In the meantime, the two girls do indeed team up to write totally deep and powerful Euro-trash pop songs, which eventually find their way to t.A.T.u.'s manager, who's convinced of their utter genius. The band's participation in the film could charitably be called a cameo, although their music does fill the soundtrack. Most of their onscreen time comes via pre-taped videos shown in nightclubs and on cell phones. The big t.A.T.u. concert that Lana and Janie first get together to see is never even shown, since the girls somehow wind up with counterfeit tickets in a plot thread that gets quickly dropped.
Like t.A.T.u.'s, the movie's understanding of lesbianism is strictly superficial and chaste, with Lana and Janie sharing little more than hand-holding except for one brief bedroom scene in which they strip to their underwear and kiss a couple of times, before pulling the covers over themselves to hide whatever may come next. It's certainly far from transgressive or liberating; early t.A.T.u. music video "All the Things She Said" was more provocative (and more believable). When the girls first meet in person, the best the movie can do to foreshadow future lesbianism is to pack Janie's iPod with stereotypical queer-friendly artists (Ani DiFranco, CSS, Le Tigre), all of whom would probably be deeply ashamed to be associated with t.A.T.u.
The stars don't exactly successfully sell the relationship either, and Barton's cartoonish Russian accent is distracting (she sounds like one of the thugs from The Big Lebowski when she declares, "We are nihilists"). It's no surprise that Barton, Yelchin and VanSanten (who went on to star on One Tree Hill) have shied away from promoting the movie, which is already a somewhat fascinating (if also tiresome) time capsule of forgotten pop culture less than five years after it finished production.
