Translated material
Eyes charm
New film by Otar Ioseliani on Moscow screens
Vincent first figured out how to use fleas and wasps as stealthy but effective weapons of mass destruction. Then he became the Minister of Agriculture and the owner of a luxurious office, where paintings of cows and pigs hung on the walls, and you could play solitaire all day long and do simple physical exercises with a light barbell. But every raspberry comes to an end: the slogans of demonstrators rise outside the office windows, Paris is seething, and now Vincent is a retired minister. The office goes to the successor, insolent squatters settle in the apartment, beloved women (or rather those who very skillfully pretended to be so) point their manicured fingers at the door. And Vincent finds himself on the street. Not only on it, of course - there are also taverns where giraffes are painted on the walls and always splash red, friends' apartments, parents' house - the beginning of the beginning, and some women can still shelter and then ask to leave the key under the rug. And pretty soon it turns out that this kind of pastime is no worse than a high government post.However, this could have been guessed even sooner. Otar Ioseliani’s film “Gardens in Autumn” can generally be predicted right up to the very end in the very first frames. It is not very different from the master’s previous creations - the same cozy sadness, generously flavored with red wine, melancholy fun, strange and funny characters - you either feel sorry for them or envy them. In any other case, this would have caused irritation, but it is absolutely impossible to resist Ioseliani’s charm. This is like blaming the seasons for their once and for all established order. And even the fact that here after autumn comes autumn, then autumn, and then autumn again, does not change things much. The main ideas of the picture are so obvious even for a parable that it’s even somehow awkward to formulate them. And so everything is clear. Moreover, they are essentially quite dubious (it is no coincidence that a critic of the most important serious film magazine in the world, Cahiers du Cinema, called the message of The Gardens “meager, predictable and controversial”) - but this does not matter at all. The film doesn't seem to care. And just as you are about to sharpen your pen and convict Ioseliani of repetition, confusion and monotony, the thought comes: don’t you yourself live exactly the same as the unhappy and at the same time happy Vincent. And any argument criticizing the picture turns out to be directed against your own life - absurd, strange and yet wonderful in its own way. Even if there is no toucan in a cage, a tame cheetah, a black lover, Michel Piccoli in the role of the absolutely wonderful mother of the main character and Vladimir Voinovich in the episodic role of an agricultural official. The most important thing is that the general mood is captured correctly, in the only possible way. “I feel sad - well, I’ll go for a walk. I have no one to share it with.” It’s difficult to call “Gardens in Autumn” innovative purely cinematically (although the editing here is absolutely wonderful, you simply don’t notice it, the number of cuts is kept to a minimum, but this is not a formal trick, but the only possible way to tell this kind of story), but in everything that concerns the mood , nothing like this has appeared on our screens for a long time. To be precise, from Ioseliani’s previous film.