Comedy-drama about a widowed Russian president and the Chinese Ambassador who fall in love. It’s all-legitimate foreign policy, but “politics is perception” and sparks fly anyway.

SYNOPSIS:

http://www.magicalrealism.us/2014/04/13/chinas-ambassador-in-moscow/ China’s Ambassador In Moscow Screenplay by Lee A. Miller and Timur Algabekov Russia has in the recent past has a spat with the West; relations are at an all time low. However, new and improved economic relations with China are on the horizon. Immensely popular Russian President Alexander Grishin is preparing to run for re-election. The President and his staff, led by Kremlin Chief of Staff Victor Perestoronin, attempt to consolidate the administration’s 79% approval rating by moving more toward the West. However, support for the move toward the West in Russia’s parties is tepid: old school Russian conservatives do not want it, and the opposition liberals oppose Grishin’s every move. However, if the economic relations with the West are good and the money flows into Russia, though, Grishin’s re-election is presumed by his staff to be a shoo-in, and Grishin resolves to announce the bill, and the Duma’s support to pass it, in a major televised speech. With the President of China about to arrive in Russia to attend a Kremlin dinner in his honor, Grishin — widowed when his wife died in a terrorist attack three years earlier – is placed in an awkward predicament when his cousin, with whom he had planned to attend the dinner, gets sick. Grishin needs a date for the dinner. The Russian President’s attention soon focuses on Liu Shishi, China’s Ambassador to Russia. She was just instructed by the Chinese leadership to persuade the Russian President to pass legislation committing his Administration to substantially increasing oil and gas sales to China. During their first meeting, Grishin and Shishi are immediately intrigued by each other. At this meeting, Grishin strikes a deal with Shishi: if she can secure the support of 12 of his economic advisors for the new China trade scheme by Christmas, he will support the new trade initiative with China. Whatever his personal feelings towards Shishi, he expresses this to his staff, especially the pragmatic Victor, as a sound political move. Perestoronin believes Shishi will not be able to get enough support to meet her side of the deal, thus releasing Grishin from responsibility if the China trade law fails get the support of the Kremlin economists. Later that evening, in a series of phone calls, Grishin invites Shishi to the Kremlin dinner. During the State dinner and subsequent occasions, the couple fall in love. When the opposition presidential candidate Alex Nepein learns “the President’s got a girlfriend”, he steps up his attacks on Grishin and Shishi, focusing on Shishi’s activist past and maligning Grishin’s ethics and his family values. President Grishin refuses to respond to these attacks, which drives his approval ratings lower and costs him some crucial political support, without which his restoration of Western ties seems doomed to failure. At the Kremlin New Years party, Shishi is dejected about her meeting that day with three Kremlin officials about the new China trade and how it was a dismal failure; in the process, she inadvertently mentions to the President and Nepein that the Kremlin officials in question said the only bill they were more interested in defeating than the President’s crime bill was Shishi’s China trade proposal. Grishin and Nepein are conflicted by this information as Shishi clearly had no idea of the implications of this casual conversation, much less that they might actually use this information in their favor and against her China trade initiative. Eventually, Shishi does manage to get enough support to meet her part of the deal. However, in the meantime, Grishin’s team discovers he is exactly three votes short, with no other apparent options to acquire them except by shelving the Western trade deal, thus solidifying the support of the three Kremlin economists — which he agrees to do. This results in disaster for Shishi as she is immediately fired from her lobbyist job, as she failed to achieve her objectives, as well as seemingly jeopardizing her political reputation. She visits the Kremlin to break up with Grishin and says that she has a job possibility in Hartford, Connecticut. He tells her politics is making choices, his number one priority has always been the Western trade, and that he does not want to lose her over this. She congratulates him on getting the leverage for his Western trade proposal that in no way will help Russia. She concludes, “Mr. President, you have bigger problems than losing me – Russia’s just lost 1.3 billion consumers.” On the morning that he is to deliver his speech to the Duma, Grishin makes a surprise appearance in the Kremlin press room and eloquently rebuts Nepein’s attacks on Shishi’s past and his own values and character. He declares he will send the controversial China trade bill to the Duma with a massive 20% increase in infrastucture — far more than the 10% originally envisioned — and that he is withdrawing his support for the weak Western trade program, promising to write a stronger one in due time. In his speech he even promises increased student and teacher exchange between Russia and China, in an attempt at solving of both nation’s problems. His passionate and erudite defense of those things in which he believes, in contrast to his earlier passive behavior, galvanizes the press and his staff. Grishin declares he is “going over to her house and I’m not leaving until I get her back”, but Shishi enters the Oval Office before he can leave. The couple are reconciled and the President, accompanied by Shishi, leaves to give his Duma speech. The movie ends with Grishin entering the Duma chamber to thunderous applause. There are several levels to this story. One is the personal relationship between Grishin and Shishi. Another involves her job, as a Chinese diplomat that needs Kremlin support for a Siberian gas pipeline. The third is the situation inside the Kremlin, where Grishin faces an election-year challenge from a powerful opposition liberal and is trying to get a controversial crime bill passed. President Grishin isn’t so squeaky-clean; eventually we find Shishi eventually sleeping in the Kremlin (and as she becomes lost in the halls mingling awkwardly with security staff during an especially funny 5 A.M. scene). But before this the film spins a bashful buildup to this phase of the courtship, even staging a first kiss in St. Andrew’s Hall. And it hits moral quicksand over the question of pillow talk; could there be anything wrong with Shishi lobbying the Russian President after hours? Grishin flirts with political danger to be near Shishi. The movie’s center is of course the love story, and Grishin and Shishi have remarkable chemistry; their scenes are written in a way without sacrificing the notion that two such people might very likely find themselves in similar situations. The inevitable strategic questions (like whether the power of “the most powerful man in the free world” extends to his bedside prowess) are part of the general embarrassment that both feel because Russia, in a sense, comes between them. At the current time, “therussianpresident” is one word, said reverently, and embodied great power and virtue in the national interest. This film suggests the moral weight of the Russian presidency while at the same time incorporating much of the inside information we now have about the way the Kremlin functions.

CHINA’S AMBASSADOR IN MOSCOW

http://www.magicalrealism.us/2014/04/13/chinas-ambassador-in-moscow/