Igor Mantsov. The Fatherland is in danger

The Fatherland is in danger
Igor Mantsov

Publication date: November 16, 2004

Longing for the golden age of cinema, Godard noted that former actors had to work a lot physically: run, fall, swim, grimace, fight, sweat until they stupor in the spotlight. Labor in cinema was embodied; it was certified by bruises, abrasions, fractures and concussions. But today's actors are sybaritic, everything with them is conditional, make-believe. Anything - a backup is ready. Godard is against imitation, Godard is radical.

I think that according to the law of conservation, the amount of labor is always the same. If the actors have stopped taking risks and sweating, it means that someone else is now doing the extra work: the producer, the cameraman; maybe a screenwriter; probably the director. In short, cinema is a pleasant journey only for the viewer. However, if the so-called screen masters still haven’t finished their work, then the viewer feels confused. And the most responsible viewer, colloquially called a critic, takes upon himself the work of reconstructing the idea ( the idea not of the would-be filmmakers, but of the Creator, whose World was at least imprinted on film). The critics are ultimately paid for this reconstruction. That's it.

Five years ago, one Tula acquaintance, a former classmate, innocently said: “Why is a critic? He gets pleasure, and then he also gets money!” No, Sveta, a critic does not always enjoy a film, more often - from his own efforts, from the redevelopment and European-quality renovations that he carries out in a miserable, tumbledown shack, built by practicing filmmakers at public expense. So, Sveta is a dental technician, this introduction is personal for you.

Unfortunately, the question “Why a dentist?” doesn't occur to anyone. She knows this strong side of hers and therefore dares to attack. For the rest of you who are sure that a critic is as useful as a dentist, the following analysis of the film “My Step Brother Frankenstein” is dedicated. This picture by screenwriter Gennady Ostrovsky and director Valery Todorovsky left in my soul, if not cold indifference, then an aftertaste in the genre of “insufficient work.”

I came across newspaper reviews viewing the film in the ominous light of the Caucasian war, from which a physically and spiritually crippled guy returns, the new son of a prosperous Moscow scientist (actor L. Yarmolnik). This guy is a sin of youth, conceived from a scientist by a provincial barmaid or nurse. Now she has died, the guy needs surgery on his eye damaged by shrapnel. The guy moves into his father's house thanks to the moral impulse of the scientist's current wife (actor E. Yakovleva) and against the wishes of the scientist himself, his own father. There are two more children in the house: a 15-year-old teenager and a younger girl. The stranger is gradually shaking the foundations of the family. Ultimately, mental illness and the desire to fight invisible enemies lead to the stranger taking his new family hostage and naturally becoming a victim of special forces.

To begin with: the Caucasian war has nothing to do with it, the Caucasian war is speculation . Not more than two weeks ago, when analyzing the film “Ours,” I already pointed out what dangers await filmmakers in the territory where collective violence is happening. This is an extremely sensitive, virtually mined area. Let kamikazes or sappers work there. The paradox is that the plot presented by Ostrovsky and Todorovsky is a classic plot, in essence an archetype. In order for it to take place, there is no need to exploit a bloody war. Attempts by our critics to interpret the film solely within the parameters of a current military conflict are an immoral substitution and blatant unprofessionalism.

After we have settled accounts with the war, we will pull out a general plot or even a bush of plots. These are the expressions in which the heroine of Elena Yakovleva introduces the new family member to her own children: “Circumstances have developed in such a way that Pavlik appeared in our house!” Great, this moronic formula, oddly enough, is enough to do without military speculation. This is where the movie should start! After all, if we are told a private family story , then in the coordinates of this story the root of evil is not a war unleashed by someone unknown, in whose interests it is unknown, but an old father’s sin . He slept, conceived and forgot - this is the problem of the Father, his current wife, and two younger children. This is a copybook. This is an eternal and very powerful story. In essence, it would be much more “appropriate” if Pavlik was injured not in war, but in everyday life, in a fight, at a factory, something like that. Because this kind of reason is “same root” with subsequent family squabbles, and a terrible war is from a different vocabulary, from another dimension.

The most disgusting thing: in the form in which the plot is presented by Ostrovsky and Todorovsky, it has no artistic solution. It is a privileged field for ideological litigation and speculation. A couple of times in my columns I attacked representatives of the middle class , and now I will defend them. Art is not an ideological scheme. In art, we are on the side of the protagonist. We follow it, identify with it, judge it, try to understand it, and ultimately forgive it: this is how the text is structured, this is its inalienable pragmatics. If the text is done correctly , we manage to coincide with both the Prince of Denmark and the dog Kashtanka. What can we say about the scientist and middle manager presented in this picture! If Yarmolnik’s character is truly a protagonist , I’m ready to not give a damn about social differences and sympathize with his scary situation. Mad son, this skeleton in the closet, threatening the new family and well-being, really must be destroyed!

Some people will be surprised, but I insist: the plot of Adrien Lyne’s excellent film “Fatal Attraction” is typologically similar to the plot of “Frankenstein” . The protagonist of the American genre masterpiece, a respectable family man played by Michael Douglas, has a skeleton in his closet - a sudden affair with a certain femme fatale (actor Glenn Close). The lady sets out to destroy the Douglas family, for blackmail, and at first we perceive her harassment as a natural payment for sin presented to the hero. However, the payment rises, and now the moment comes when the viewer realizes that from now on the payment and sin are disproportionate , that the lady has crossed the line and that now she is not even an avenger, but a murderer . And so we, the audience, each of us, who experienced Douglas’s drama from the inside, say: Douglas, now you can defend yourself by any available means, now you will be right in any case.

Again I am forced to talk about the absence in Russia of urban culture and the accompanying genre consciousness. Taught by the tradition of literary psychologism, Todorovsky tries to maneuver between Pavlik and the Father. Hopes to understand both, forgive both. Again, as in “The Lover,” he dreams of maintaining a politically correct balance! How much to explain that this balance has nothing to do with Western liberal values, that it is just eclecticism, profanity, insufficient work . Normal work is to choose one main character and give him the last truth .

So, if the protagonist is the Father, then he is an eccentric with the letter "m". Because, faced with a direct threat to his younger children, his wife and himself, he only rolled his eyes, chewed his tongue and kept his limp hands in his pockets. Do you love the middle class as I loved it while watching this outrageous picture? If you love him, will you really agree that this helpless moral monster played by Yarmolnik is his typical representative? Even the compassionate wife gets angry: “He’s a fucking physicist, he’s a buffoon!” The authors are still interested in understanding the ancient Russian intelligentsia, which has long since mutated and become stratified. And was there?

Okay, let's soften up. Maybe the protagonist is Pavlik, named so probably with an allusion to the popular “traitor” Pavlik Morozov? Pavlik drives the attentive viewer into a stupor with such rhyming remarks, almost poetry:

Yes, you understand, dad!
I understand better where you should be.

As the next generation says in such cases, it’s cool and characteristic . The image of Pavlik is, of course, the authors’ polemic with Alexei Balabanov’s “Brothers.” Balabanov has already implemented the option where the “alien from the war” is the protagonist, and in essence closed the topic. Balabanov likes the handsome and charming Danila Bagrov. Ostrovsky and Todorovsky are disgusted by the very thought of leaving the final truth to Pavlik, and they turn him into an unpleasant freak. No problem. There remains a third candidate for primacy, the one whose image is encrypted in the title of the film.

Whose speech is this: “My half-brother...”? Let’s immediately discard the journalistic version, they say, this is each of us. No, the archetype points to a very specific brother, a 15-year-old “good” one. The “bad” Pavlik teaches him his specific truth, and the “good” one responds by persuading the street guys to beat Pavlik and drive him out . Here it is, another grandiose story about two brothers, good and bad, Abel and Cain, not noticed by the authors, reimagined, for example, in Elia Kazan’s film “East of Eden” with James Dean, according to Steinbeck, a film that I recommend watching in rhyme to Todorovsky and just for the soul. “And Cain went away and wandered in the land of Noth, east of paradise... Maybe you should go somewhere?” - the local sheriff addresses the bad James Dean, who “offended” both his good brother and father.

But no, our liberal intellectuals don’t want to know either archetypes, or the rules of plotting, or common sense. The third candidate, the offended “good” brother, is also out of work. Well, at least he rejoiced at the death of his enemy in the finale! Nothing of the kind, and this one is not a fighter, not a hero . What Frankenstein describes and indirectly offers as a model of social order is not civil society, but a totalitarian incubator . The “bad” hero of James Dean said at the end of his great picture to the bankrupt clean-cut father: “A man has a choice, and it is the choice that makes him a man!” So I swore off praising the Americans for our edification, but I couldn’t resist. Let the offended Fatherland forgive me once again.