Children's hell

Several films about how children live in the world of adults are released at the same time

Dostoevsky began the story "A Boy with a Pen" (a kind of preface to the famous Christmas story "A Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree") with the words: "Children are a strange people, they dream and imagine." This dream and haze spilled onto the screens: several films about a perverted version of a happy childhood and adolescence are released in limited release at once. The Estonian existential drama "Class" by Ilmar Raag was filmed in 2007, the Greek dystopia "Fang" by Yorgos Lanthimos and "Melody for the Street Organ" by Kira Muratova - in 2009. In these very different films, childhood is the evil years, when a person takes the world on faith, and the world turns out to be much worse than we would like.

Cinema in general - and especially arthouse - has always been interested in adolescent violence, the absurdity of family obedience, the cruelty of adult life towards children. So this interest in children cannot be called a new cinematic trend. But this accidental coincidence of the rental policy nevertheless opens up a rather gloomy and versatile view of children's hell. “Klass”, which has been walking around various festivals for several years and was even an Estonian Oscar nominee (although it was not included in the shortlist), will attract fans of the TV series “School” by Valeria Gai-Germanika, where wonderful school bastards also pop their truth in the face of the camera.

Fang, winner of last year's Un Certain Regard at Cannes, is a fitting political allegory for a closed society living by absurd rules. Shown at last year's Moscow Film Festival, "Melody for a Street Organ" will offer a harsh response to the fashionable rhetoric about orphans and confirm society's vague sense that a world in which children don't get enough love is obviously sick.

Kira Muratova, one of perhaps a dozen brilliant directors living in the world today, has her own relationship with time. She speaks time, as one speaks a wound. And in response, it hisses, purrs, rubs against the legs, demands attention.

All of Muratova's films look like they are broadcasting a news program over a flask from a Kunstkamera. The ugliness grows larger and lasts forever, the grimaces of suffering can be seen in every detail, the weather forecast floats in formalin. Because of Muratova's sarcastic farcicalness, her films can seem at the same time an eerie holiday and unbearable antics, exaggeration and an accurate portrait of the time.

“Melody for a barrel organ” is a ruthless Christmas story, a nativity scene, roughly knocked together from improvised garbage, but shining with real gold leaf. These are variations on the theme of the biblical story of the beating of babies: half-brothers and sisters, Alena and Nikita, run away from the orphanage on Christmas Eve and go in search of their fathers. Mom died, there is no one to count on. Children wander through a twisted, cold world, finding themselves either at the station, or in the supermarket, or in the casino, or on the street in front of the windows, behind which rich children decorate the Christmas tree. Alena and Nikita circle from one "living picture" to another, bumping into a confession, rebuke or aria. All this is all the more like a dream and a haze, because the action periodically stalls, the world seems to freeze, and then the petty demons begin their petty bacchanalia. People at the station are shouting, not listening or hearing anything, into their mobile phones. Glamorous, almost Boschian freaks compete to see who steals the most goods in the supermarket. Zemfira on the soundtrack sings the same song like a dull hurdy-gurdy. A vicious circle, dead water, do not emerge.

All this is furnished theatrically sublimely, with musty pre-Christmas splendor. In an interview, Muratova said that she was carried away by external decorativeness in order to show the structure of the world, to show that "beads are put on a thread in a necklace." Her universe is a place where all the levers are twisted to the maximum, where decorativeness, loudness, stupidity, hope, arrogance, homelessness go off scale, and all this so that a simple harsh thread shines through between them, on which these beads are strung. Life.

In the film "Fang" - a different kind of theatricality. Here, parents seriously play out a long-term performance in front of growing children, explaining how the world works. The world is arranged very simply: behind the fence of their house is full of dangers, and only the father can survive there - an adult, whose canine has already fallen out. If you go beyond the fence, you will die, so there is practically no outside world for children, and they don’t need it. Parents hide their phones from their children, and they only watch family videos on TV. The father brings the necessary food from the city, launching the fish into the pool and assuring them that they spontaneously generate there.

And everything that does not spontaneously generate can give birth to the mother of the family. All randomly escaped words that denote "non-existent" concepts, parents explain in their own way: "sea" is a type of furniture, "zombie" is a yellow flower. From the point of view of an external observer, the rules of life of this family are ugly and absurd, but for the heroes there is no external observer. They are ready to live like this forever - swim in the pool, walk on the grass, study the anatomical atlas, watch home videos, give family concerts, invent new games to brighten up the slow boredom of the eternal midsummer. But now the system ceases to be closed, a person from the outside comes into the house: the father hires a girl “for the health” of his son. The girl leaves a cassette with a real, not homemade, film in the house, and for one of the sisters this becomes something of an initiation.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos says he came up with The Fang while discussing the future of the institution of the family with friends. What can the head of the family do who wants to save the family at all costs, to make sure that the children stay forever with their parents? "Fang" is at the same time a warning about the dead end that authoritarianism leads to, and an experiment on living people, a knavery dystopian fairy tale pierced by the sun. Fifteen-eighteen-year-old children in the film are infantile and happy, they obey their elders and do not challenge the laws of the universe. History has not yet begun for them, and if they continue to obey, it will not begin.

Against this background, the Estonian "Class" looks even too realistic. Based on the same story as Gus Van Sant's Elephant, the film is about two teenagers who massacre a school and shoot their classmates to death. But Raag is not interested in the slaughter, but in the way that the heroes come to it. A downtrodden, weird high school student, the eternal scapegoat, finds an unexpected protector among his classmates. Now there are two outcasts, and the film with some insatiable fury flies to the natural finale. The director specifically asked Estonian schoolchildren what could be the last straw in the confrontation between school losers and aggressive class leaders. So "Class" is based on several real stories, although it is more high tragedy than teenage pseudo-realism.

The most terrible thing that all these films have in common is the indifferent, oppressive, ugly world of adults. At best, adults do not care, at worst - they themselves dictate the rules that break their children. Perhaps the most terrible ghoul in "Melody for a barrel organ" is the hero of Oleg Tabakov, a businessman who wants to take a "little angel" from the street, but he has no time. He calls his wife (Renata Litvinova) and calls her to the supermarket for a child. Not finding the “angel”, Litvinova, in a fairy costume, ascends the elevator, melancholy wondering: “Was there a boy?”

Judging by the latest films about children and teenagers, the main problem is that adults are generally not sure that children are people too. Children are a strange people, they dream and imagine. And when you wake up - it's already late, there are no more boys or girls. Run out.