Eternal? Fire!

It is impossible not to get personal when talking about Burnt by the Sun 2. Because there is nothing but a mysterious Russian soul named Nikita Mikhalkov in them.

The film "Burnt by the Sun-2. Anticipation” would be good to discuss without being distracted by Nikita Mikhalkov. Behind this name, a trail of some kind of quarrels, scandals, the great war for the Union of Cinematographers immediately crawls out, and one has to talk not about cinema, but about some kind of ink cloud around cinema. About an unprecedented budget in Russia of $ 55 million and a circulation of 1018 copies, about the visit of the main persons of the state to the set, about the premiere in the Kremlin Palace, about the fact that the film must be squeezed to two hours for the Cannes Film Festival - there is no longer any strength to talk about cinema enough. But if we discuss "Expectation" forgetting about the author, then it's all the more impossible to talk about cinema, because there is no cinema here.

There is a crudely painted picture with a golden salary, several short stories about the oddities of war and God's providence. Sappers accidentally blow up a bridge full of people. Clean Kremlin cadets die in the first battle. The dying tanker Dormidont asks the nurse to show her boobs. Retelling the plot of "Expectation" is like retelling a banal dream and suddenly realizing how obscene it is. Serial emotions, grotesque comic style, sham world.

Divisional Commander Kotov (Nikita Mikhalkov) did not die, as the enemies of the people lied in the finale of the first "Burnt by the Sun", but went to the camp, where the "political" article was replaced with "embezzlement in especially large ones." He escaped from the camp in the first days of the war, ended up in a penal battalion. Mitya Arsentiev (Oleg Menshikov) healed his cut veins, married Kotov's wife, Marusa, adopted a girl, Nadia, and set off on Stalin's orders to look for the division commander Kotov himself.

Marusya (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) died in the 40th year in the camp, but was reborn by Victoria Tolstoganova and is now hysterical. Nadia (Nadezhda Mikhalkova) suddenly matured a lot and became a nurse. Kotov is looking for her. Infernal Mitya is looking for Kotov. People are dying all around. Some of them are praying, others are saving the chandelier. There are also fascists - these are going to poop from an airplane onto a sanitary barge, burning villages, eating apples. There are also the horrors of war - torn off limbs, protruding intestines, dead pioneers, crushed soldiers, clocks ticking on the hands of corpses.

The episode with the clock, like the whole "series" about the Kremlin cadets, is a free retelling of Konstantin Vorobyov's story "Killed near Moscow." And even, rather, its adaptation - the film by Alexander Itygilov "It's us, Lord! ..". Only there was one torn off hand, and in the mind of Mikhalkov, these hands multiplied. Because everything should be as much as possible, otherwise it will not work. More extras, prayers, corpses, planes, Nadia's hysterical tears, money, flashbacks, snow, frames with a butterfly. More time for each frame to reach even the most slow-witted.

There is really a lot of stuff in The Anticipation, as opposed to the first Burnt Sun, compressed to a fireball. But for all its scope, the new film resembles a stuffy, boring closet, into which real light only occasionally penetrates. Then Yevgeny Mironov will appear, make everyone laugh obscenely and die. Then Sergey Makovetsky will falsely sing “The Burnt Sun” and write the protocol of interrogation: I, Pushkin A.S., confess that I fired a shot at Dantes Zh.Sh. and myself was wounded in the stomach by him, which is why I died. Then Natalya Surkova, appearing for three minutes, will expose Nadya Mikhalkov as a very plastic crying doll.

Otherwise, "Expectation" is a carnival of dead souls, that is, not even souls - body parts, fragments of films, fragments of books. Glamorous or simply famous faces flash by, then disappear in the blood. A shaggy bumblebee from the famous Mikhalkov role flies in, gypsies wander in, demons rush swarm after swarm.

One of the meanings of the word "anticipation" is prayer. Nadia repeats: "Lord, make sure that my will does not override Yours." But the plot is built on failures and accidents, which are more like not God's will, but scenario arbitrariness. Here is Nadya floating on the sea on a mine. Swims to the shore, says: “Thank you, mine. Swim, mine! - and she obediently blows up the steamboat, which shortly before that did not help Nadia. Here a fascist plane flies, a bomb is stuck in it and does not shake out in any way, but at the moment when Kotov is in danger, the bomb flies down and saves his life. Where is God's will here? Enthusiastic devilry, no "it's us, Lord", a solid "it's me, I."

"Expectation" should not be seen in the context of a military epic like "Saving Private Ryan" or "Come and See". It's more like The Matrix without being able to wake up, being John Malkovich without the hope of not being John Malkovich. The monologue of an unreliable narrator who doesn't know himself to be unreliable. This also happens: the hero of Bruce Willis, until the very end of The Sixth Sense, thinks that he is alive, and in Scorsese's Shutter Island, the madman sinks deeper and deeper into his subconscious, believing that he is solving a crime in a madhouse. But in such cases, there is at least one more being who is aware of what is happening: the head physician, a little boy, a director, a spectator. In "Anticipation" the characters are just figures on the board, the director is sure that he is offering documentary and historical evidence, and the viewer goes to the cinema to see "how it really was."

In various interviews, Nikita Mikhalkov did not get tired of repeating that in "Burnt by the Sun-2" he tried to convey the feeling expressed by the great Leo Tolstoy: "Being only begins to be when it is threatened by non-existence." In fact, the author of these words is not Tolstoy, but Dostoevsky. And there can be no claims from historians, biologists, psychologists to "Burnt by the Sun-2". Fascist planes bombing a special purpose camp on the very first day of the war? And what else can they bomb if Kotov is in this camp? The war began for him, the war is his only salvation, the war is his great journey into the depths.

This is the inner great war of Nikita Mikhalkov. Each artist offers his own vision of events, but not everyone is so sure of his unshakable, all-consuming correctness. Is the military uniform the same? Are the buttons the same? Stalin? (Maxim Sukhanov is frighteningly persuasive.) Guts, severed legs? Death is it? So that's the life. In Sheckley's novel The Exchange of Minds, the hero thought that everything was in order, because the giant oaks, as always, migrate south every year. So Mikhalkov is sure that he shows the truth about the war and allows viewers to feel the war in their own skin.

Tolstoy - already real - wrote: “Love interferes with death. Love is life." In "Burnt by the Sun-2" there is no love, and there is no life, only death and petty Mikhalkov's immortality. Nobody loves anybody. Yes - idolizes, hates, fears, but does not love. Tanks go on a psychic attack, Nadia kisses a mine, Kotov sharpens his metal fingers. The whole world is solid Mikhalkovs and pieces of iron, and around them is a bloody mess, future or real. Already in the film "12" all the jurors were the director's grotesque masks. There are no masks left in "Anticipation". Mikhalkov paints a fresco, an icon, and he is not embarrassed that a self-portrait is obtained. The life of a saint.

No one will be surprised if in the next series - in "The Citadel" - it turns out that there was no radioactively grown Nadia and Mitya committed suicide a long time ago, and "Expectation" is the usual death raving of divisional commander Kotov. But even in this case, the film will not become more solid and meaningful, and not even because this technique does not touch the viewer as much as guignol bubbling guts, but because there is nothing behind all this. It's all an attraction, a hassle. It's a whim of a person who thinks: eternity, and there is one room, something like a village bath, smoky, and spiders in all corners, that's all eternity.