our film

By nature I am a morning person, so I am used to working from morning until 6 pm. However, when at the dacha the thermometer quickly reaches 30° and there is no end in sight, you look for other things to do. Thanks to this and, of course, the Internet, I watched three Russian films and one television program about our cinema (from the video archive of Channel 5). The television program was one of the episodes of “Oil Paintings” - a talk show hosted by Dmitry Bykov. From there I learned about two films that interested me and saw their authors: the famous director Vera Storozheva, who back in 2007 successfully presented her “Travel with Pets” at the Moscow International Film Festival, and the playwright from Yekaterinburg Vasily Sigarev, who showed at the recent “Kinotavr” "his debut film "Top".

And since my friends - film buffs and film experts - had long been telling me about A. Popogrebsky’s film “How I Spent This Summer,” I watched it first. The film seemed to me to be unreasonably drawn out (it runs for 2 hours and something) and somehow “blurry” in its elaboration of the psychology and behavior of the younger of the two characters, although it is he who is given the vast majority of the footage. Yes, the idea is interesting; good landscapes. Yes, Puskepalis is a great actor: “but that’s not enough.”

But “Top” is the strongest impression I’ve had in quite a long time, although this film consistently uses techniques that I generally do not accept either in cinema or in the theater. First of all, it's swearing; secondly, a frontal play on pity - whether for children, animals or the disabled. And “Top” as a material is simply unthinkable without both - you can’t make a film about Africa without showing people with black skin!

This is a film about a woman who became a mother against her will. She simply doesn’t need her daughter, just as she doesn’t seem to need people in general if they don’t serve as a source of money. Actually, the six-year-old daughter is the main character with an ineradicable need for maternal love and, in general, for a loved one.

The mother (there are no proper names in the film) expresses herself almost exclusively in obscenities, because she simply cannot speak otherwise.

At the same time, in her speech one can clearly hear some kind of, relatively speaking, “Ural” accent, which, combined with an indestructible vitality and absolutely model appearance (actress Yana Troyanova), creates a deafening effect of hopeless verisimilitude. Even when she is seriously ill, the heroine remains a predator, and her daughter is one of the objects that, for the sake of revenge on the whole world, she humiliates and even destroys.

It is no coincidence that at the beginning of the film, having expelled another drunk to the point of unconsciousness and also a wounded “client”, the mother not only takes away his gold chain with a cross, but also brags about it to her little daughter, who, by the way, a few minutes ago this man was a little didn’t kill him: in defense of his mother, she threw a three-liter can of milk onto him from the cabinet.

The daughter, a six-year-old girl with bangs that almost cover her eyes, speaks flawless but slightly syntactically “shifted” Russian, which is often spoken in the Russian hinterland. The girl herself says little; From time to time, what is happening - as if remembering one's childhood - is commented on in the first person by a hoarse off-screen female voice.

In retelling, this may seem like a cheap trick: a girl makes up a friend for herself while looking at a photo in a cemetery of a recently drowned boy about her age, but her conversations with a friend represented only by a photograph, taking place simultaneously with the greedy eating of sweets that relatives of the dead bring in abundance to the cemetery, in the film are organic - of course, if you are at all capable of direct perception.

The mother abandons her daughter twice: after five years she returns to nothing, but after getting her hair done and drinking heavily, she turns out to be the same person. The now grown-up girl tries to hold on to her mother—and the film ends with both figures disappearing into the darkness.

Vera Storozheva’s film “Travel with Pets”, in my opinion, was to a large extent due to the choice of actress Ksenia Kutepova for the main role. Actually, she “makes” this picture. The plot is created by the story of how, after the sudden death of her elderly husband, to whom the orphanage Natalya was “sold” at the age of 16, behind the guise of a downtrodden and impoverished “serf”, an independent personality was preserved and now blossomed - a free and strong woman.

There is little text in the film - that’s what the movie is for; but there is action not much in the literal sense. But the existing actions are filled with meaning and are deeply not accidental. It is enough to pay attention to what dresses and where the heroine appears in after the death of her husband and how she is transformed. Or watch how Natalya makes a lampshade from poor magazine pictures.

Since the name of the screenwriter Arkady Krasilshchikov did not mean anything to me, I scoured the Internet and discovered that the script was written back in 1995 - and not by a debutant at all, but by an experienced author who had done a lot of things, and from now on has long been an Israeli citizen.

“The Spinning Top,” in my opinion, cannot be shown in a cinema—it’s not a cut eye, it’s much worse. “Traveling with Pets” is not at all arthouse, but simply by its texture it can hardly be considered a “mass” movie, although I read somewhere that the film was a massive success in Poland. But you have the Internet.