| “Rules of Sex” on Moscow screens Roger Avery was very lucky with the friends of his youth. In the mid-eighties, he worked in the same video store with Quentin Tarantino, watched five films a day and considered the day well spent if a client who stopped by the rental store to rent another melodrama with Meg Ryan for the evening left loaded with Godard and Japanese samurai action films. And in their free time from watching films, Roger and Quen came up with stories that a little later transformed into “True Romance”, “Pulp Fiction” and an Oscar divided in half for best screenplay.
Roger Avory was very unlucky with the friends of his youth. From the moment Tarantino became a cinematic phenomenon number one, Avory found himself in his big shadow and for several years he did nothing but persistently prove to the city and the world that it was he, and not the great Tarantino, who came up with this or that scene of “Fiction” ; It is he who is the author of the theory about the homosexual background of the film “Top Gun”, with which Tarantino flashed a benefit monologue in the film “Sleep with Me”; it was he... and so on. Even if everything Avory said was actually true, it didn't look the best. Moreover, no one particularly liked his own directorial debut, Killing Zoe. So, after filming “Zoey” with the absolutely absurd “Mr. Stitch” with Rutger Hauer as a modern-day Frankenstein, Avory fell silent for six years. And he returned with a project that turned out to be, if not unambiguously successful, then at least very interesting.
Avary adapted Bret Easton Ellis' novel Rules of Attraction, a paean to Anglo-Saxon boyhood. Ellis, who made his debut in literature at the age of twenty-three with the novel Less Than Zero and then became famous for American Psycho, is disliked by many and denied true skill, setting him up as an example of another iconic writer of Generation X, Douglas Copeland. The stylist from Ellis may not really be a god knows what, but he senses something very important like no one else. The sweetish deadness that has been lurking since birth in the souls of young drug addicts, cynics and adulterers - all these students of prestigious colleges, prosperous sons of the powerful and the low caste people hanging around them - is felt almost physically when reading Ellis. And it doesn’t let you forget about it for a long time. It remains even when “The Rules of Sex” is transferred to the screen - the feeling is not the most pleasant, but it is extremely strong and therefore attracts attention. Allegedly, a love triangle, including representatives of different genders and sexual orientations, serves only as a frame on which sketches from the life of young representatives of the “upper middle class” are strung. It appears that a more repulsive social stratum simply does not exist. These are stylishly dressed living dead, energy vampires who feed on other people's emotions and then suffer from indigestion. We are not talking about any kind of juvenile rebellion - their drug and sexual escapades seem not to be a challenge to the system, but to be a rage with fat. It is to the heroes of Ellis-Avory, this new generation of zombie civilization, that Letov’s desperate cry of ten years ago seems to be addressed: “Sid Vicious died before your eyes, Jim Morrison died before your eyes, Ian Curtis died before your eyes, and you remained like that.” same as it was." And it got even worse. There is no way to tear yourself away from this cabinet of curiosities, this kind of business lunch of Belshazzar: the interest that these extremely unsympathetic (but at the same time quite sexy) characters evoke is akin to the disgusting and alluring curiosity that arises when watching amateur pornography. But nevertheless, this is not pornography (although there are plenty of shocking, overt scenes in the film), but a real movie.
Avory won, if only because he thought of performing on a platform where he would certainly not be compared to Tarantino (Avory’s plans include a film adaptation of another, Ellis’s most famous novel to date, “Glamorama”). But the thing is that even now it is very difficult to say whether he is a good director or not. Even when the movie was quite successful for him. Those little differences that the gangsters talked about in “Pulp Fiction” get in the way. If for the same Tarantino (well, there’s no escape from him), each of the numerous film quotes stood in its place and performed a very specific role, then Avory’s handling of the classics looks much more chaotic and random. Take, for example, his unconditional respect for German expressionism: back in Killing Zoe, the main characters made love in front of the TV, where Max Schreck was gawking in the role of Nosferatu, and now one of the characters in The Rules of Sex injects himself with a dose of heroin without looking up a look from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And, actually, why? What would change if the monitor broadcast, say, cartoons about the Flintstones? Avory doesn’t give an answer, and you begin to somehow doubt the sincerity of his cinephile urges. Stanislav F. ROSTOTSKY |
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