By Andrei Skvarsky.
Russia’s biggest lender Sberbank has shot a humour-tinged deepfake ad video showing a character transferred from a 1973 Soviet comedy film into the Moscow of 2020 being amazed by and enjoying a variety of services offered by the bank’s ecosystem.
Petty burglar George Miloslavsky from the movie Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession, also known in the West as Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future, is stunned by the range of facilities that Sberbank offers him, for instance mobile banking, telemedicine, food delivery, and a taxi service.
Miloslavsky looks no different in the video than he does in Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession. He was played in the old movie by Leonid Kuravlyov, a famous actor who is 84 today.
Kuravlyov’s speech in the ad footage was synthesised by a Sberbank subsidiary from soundtracks in films of decades ago that starred him.
Sberbank, which is currently rebranding itself as Sber, obtained permission from Kuravlyov to use the Miloslavsky image in the video and bought the rights to do so.
Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession is based on a 1930s play by Tussian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, author of the famous novel The Master and Margarita.
In the movie, an engineer who has created a time machine falls asleep and dreams that, by using the device, he sends two men back to the times of Ivan the Terrible and brings the 16th-century Russian tsar over to 1970s Moscow.
Miloslavsky is one of the men travelling four centuries back. He is accidentally caught by the time machine while robbing a neighbouring apartment.
The video starts with a scene from the 1973 movie in which Miloslavsky holds up a wad of rouble notes worth a fortune that he has just come across in the apartment he is burgling and facetiously quotes a Soviet slogan, “Fellow citizens, keep your money in Savings Bank”.
Savings Bank was Sberbank’s Soviet-era name.
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