The unbearable difficulty of being. Aleksey German's film based on the Strugatsky brothers' novel It's Hard to Be a God is not yet ready: the soundtrack is ahead, which will take more than a month or two. However, the first viewers were able to see the first montage of the picture, which has been in the making for ten years. Among the few witnesses to the trial was a columnist for The New Times
Some will inevitably call this film the best creation of Herman, others - the worst. For the first, it will become “the most ingenious”, “the most avant-garde”, “the most piercing”, for the second - “the most indistinct”, “the most gloomy”, “the most unbearable”. But even having renounced any emotions, it is not difficult to understand that "It's hard to be a god" is the result of all the searches and struggles of the author. He has been preparing for this film all his life and recently officially announced that, having completed work on it in the year of his 70th birthday, he will retire from cinema. The picture was conceived back in the 60s, more than forty years have become a stretched preparation for it.
Leonid Yarmolnik (left) played his best role in Herman's film
Always German, making a movie about the Stalin era, carried in his heart the Middle Ages, dear to him (or unkind, but inseparable from his optics). Those who have read the recently released book of screenplays, What the Tobacco Man Said from Tobacco Street, which includes the unrealized The Sad and Cautionary Tale of Dick Shelton based on Black Arrow and the non-Herman-made The Doom of Otrar (a kind of anti-Mongol), know about the medieval mania of the perfectionist director. Only the lazy did not write about the similarity of our era with the Middle Ages after Umberto Eco, and the onset of the Dark Ages in today's Russia has also been discussed for a long time - exactly from the end of the 90s, when after Khrustalev German finally took up the Strugatskys. A half-forgotten need for an Aesopian language has just ripened in society. Any real story told by means of cinema unwittingly becomes a fantasy. Any fantasy in the hands of Herman inevitably turns into reality.
Worst of all worlds
1965 - Workers' village (directed by Vladimir Vengerov) - second director 1967 - The Seventh Sputnik - co-director 1971-1985 - Check on the roads (based on the story by Yuri German "Operation Happy New Year!") - director 1976 - Twenty days without war (according to the story Konstantin Simonov) - director 1977 - Sit next to me, Mishka! - screenwriter 1980 - Rafferty - actor 1980 - Sergey Ivanovich retires - actor 1981 - Personal life of the director - actor 1984 - My friend Ivan Lapshin (based on the novel by Yuri German) - director, co-author of the script 1989 - Time gone by - actor 1991 - Death of Otrar - screenwriter, producer 1991 - Happy Days - producer 1994 - Castle - actor 1995 - Mania Giselle - actor 1995 - Trofim (short story from the film almanac "The Arrival of the Train") - actor 1995-1996 - Sergei Eisenstein. Autobiography - actor 1998 - Khrustalev, car! - Director, co-writer
There is a common critical cliché - to talk about "their own world" of this or that director. In fact, few people are able to create such a world. No wonder Lars von Trier in Dogville, drawn in chalk on the floor, questioned the very possibility of constructing the universe on the screen. Herman's new film is a convincing refutation of the thesis of the skeptic Trier: it is no longer a reconstruction of an era, but a valuable construction in itself. The world is man-made and convincing in every detail, constantly creating a striking effect of being included in a separately existing dimension that will continue to live and die even after the sacramental “Stop, filmed!” Until now, Herman's fantasy has not known such freedom: after all, in non-science fiction, you can come up with anything, eclecticism and mannerism are only good, and the director, known for the incredibly slow pace of work, gets the opportunity to play enough in every spillikin, caress the camera every third-rate artifact. Everything that we see, hear, almost smell and touch, is his work. The Middle Ages with the Strugatskys, as well as Bosch and Brueghel, are only intermediate stops on the arc that connects Herman's imagination with the viscous densely populated matter of the film.
As well as the artist Leonid Yarmolnik, who played the best (who would doubt) his role, he is the main tool of removal, designed to remind the viewer: this is still a movie, and not a report from the non-existent city of Arkanar. The second and last known actor is Yuri Tsurilo (“Khrustalev, car!”), a man of amazing texture and organics, changed beyond recognition, turned into a kind of medieval Porthos. But he is an organic part of Arkanar, while Rumata-Yarmolnik is an agent of the “normal” world, a friend among strangers. It is the necessary reference point that defines the coordinate system. A reminder of the plot, which seems to be roughly the same as that of the Strugatskys: on an alien planet, mired in the darkness of ignorance, several disguised celestial earthlings are trying to save the persecuted dissidents - scribes, scientists and poets, whom the local authorities simply drown in the outhouses. A fiasco is predictable, a return is impossible. The same thing happened as in the "Planet of the Apes": while the hero flew to the stars, humanity degenerated into primates. The loneliness of the noble Don Rumata is final and irrevocable. Here Herman's know-how comes through with inevitable clarity: a humanistic message in a formally avant-garde shell.
labor pains
The hopelessness of the situation of the God-man from Earth, forever stuck in Arkanar, is fixed impassively and accurately. The frame is unbearably densely populated, there are only one or two general panoramas. The camera is cramped, objects and extras surround it from all sides, and the view is blocked by either a pig's hoof, or a horse harness, or a giant donkey's penis. At first it seems that all this was recorded on a hidden surveillance camera, hidden, according to the Strugatskys, in a gem on Rumata's forehead. However, this camera also sees Rumata himself, without separating him from the others, and therefore rather resembles the Gvidon mosquito from Pushkin's fairy tale: small, but not invisible. After all, this insect-spy is none other than you yourself, the spectator. It is in your eyes, as in a mirror, that everyone who passes by the lens constantly looks: soldiers and barons, monks and executioners, primary and secondary participants and witnesses. So that you do not relax, do not feel comfortable and calm in the cinema, do not reach for popcorn. To understand: this tale is not about Rumata - about you. As understanding progresses, the hero loses his divine features, his dazzling white shirt and shiny armor fade before his eyes. He swears, spit, blows his nose, turns into a man: the final massacre is the natural completion of the transformation. The face of God is a disguise, nothing more. The movie is about how difficult it is to be human. And in general, to be honest, about how difficult it is to be.
It is also difficult to watch: Herman is the rarest artist, whose works give a cathartic effect after viewing them, and direct acquaintance with them is always painful. How painfully slow the emergence of these films into the world. How painful their road to the public. How painful it is to be not only the son of God, who took the atonement for original sin upon himself (herman embodies this function in the character of Yarmolnik), but also the Creator, the demiurge. How painful it is to look at violence - although it has long been proven that there is no other effective therapy besides disgust therapy. So suffering is necessary. Besides, without birth pangs, Herman believes, nothing will be born into the world.
out of place
The questions that the innovator Herman asks are traditional, but in this incredibly material Universe for the first time they seem non-speculative, for the first time they gain weight. This is a question about the place of the artist under the sun and the place of his alter ego - the hero. In "Road Check" it was found out: can a hero be a private, and a private can be a hero? In Twenty Days Without War, is it possible for the witness to become a hero, and for the hero to become a witness? In My Friend Ivan Lapshin, can the subject of action become the object of feeling? In Khrustalyov (it is no coincidence that the title of the film contains a ten-degree character who does not even appear on the screen) - how to remain a hero under the pressure of the repressive mechanism of History? In the new film, the last of the questions is: is the hero possible at all, or is this a beautiful legend invented by scribes? Therefore, the plot of the Strugatskys' novel was left on the sidelines, and the frame was filled with a faceless crowd, through which it is so difficult to push through - both for the camera and for the viewer's gaze. If we recall Brueghel, then we have before us - "The Fall of Icarus". In the foreground, the plowman is busy with his daily work, and the tragedy happens somewhere in the distance, against an indistinguishable background.
Rumata with broken wings is quite a fallen Icarus, and his parent Herman is Daedalus, an incorrigibly smart labyrinth builder. He knows that people in this world do not believe in directors and gods, but in indisputable local authorities - like the obscure tobacconist from Tobacco Street, whose wise thought never sounded from the screen. By the way, now the picture is called not "It's hard to be a god" and not "What did the tobacconist say ...", but "The history of the Arkanar massacre." This supposedly neutral title contains everything: the objectivity of fact and the absoluteness of fiction, the fate of the hero and the impersonal conventionality of the chronicle. And in the epilogue to the completed "History ..." - timid sounds of music, extracted by Rumata from a saxophone taken from the Earth. It is impossible to change the world, it is senseless to cut evil. All that remains is to play the pipe quietly. Although when Herman takes up the instrument, he acquires the power of some unheard of (and, alas, inaudible to many) orchestra.
