Translated material
Non-Russian Berlin
How the Berlinale quarreled with Russian cinema
Actually, I didn’t want to write about this topic, but it comes up time after time in articles about cinema and professional conversations. Especially this year, when some films in competition at the Berlin Festival (On Black Ice by Petri Kotvica, Elegy by Isabelle Coixet, Lady Jane by Robert Guedigian) lowered the bar to the level of professional unsuitability. Why is there no Russian film in the Berlin competition (and last year there was not a single feature film at all)? Why are our films not welcomed in Berlin, where traditionally they paid special attention to cinema from the east of the west? Why, in short, do they not like us?The question is, of course, urgent, but incorrectly posed. Russian cinema is certainly not enough to please everyone. There were also bureaucratic reasons. According to rumors, the Berlinale selectors wanted to invite Alexander Proshkin’s new film “Live and Remember” to Berlin, but the film could not be completed so quickly. Not because it was technically impossible, but because in this case the government funding allocated for this year would be burned up. Absurd, and that's all.
But the main mistake of those offended for Russia is something else. It is important to understand that the expectations of the film world vary from country to country. The film that is expected from Iran will cause a condescending smile if it is filmed in Poland. A Japanese film may not get into any festival if the name of a European director is in the credits. And so on. At the same time, what is expected from Russia is completely clear. “A large-scale social canvas with a critical look at today’s Russian reality,” is how our famous producer formulated these expectations in a private conversation. And he added: “For example, “9th Company” would have been in the Berlin competition. If you insert only one scene - the shooting of civilians.”
We, of course, have a problem with large-scale social canvases. The financial and political risks are too great. So the Berlin competition is taking place without our participation. But the problem appears to be even deeper. It even seems to me that the European cultural community has subconsciously taken offense at Russia. On the one hand, Russia is an ideal artistic object for the West. A huge, tightly fenced, opaque territory in which God knows what is happening. This is where the artist, in the modern European understanding of the word, must shed light, tell how it all really is, behind the official propaganda veil. What is it with Putin, with oil, with the mafia, with corruption? Russian artists are so persistent in their refusal of this function that it seems as if there is no “really” at all. That everything really is exactly as shown on TV. It is for this unrealized potential that Europe takes offense at us.
They are, however, trying to act on their own. They even sent German director Jochen Hick to Russia to talk about how gay pride parades are being dispersed in Moscow. He made an excellent film “East/West - Sex and Politics”, shown in Berlin in the documentary “Panorama”. Spectacular shots of the crackdown, the “union of the Russian people” with icons, the April gay pogroms... The problem is one: the director begins to tell the stories of ordinary gays and lesbians living in Moscow (and not activists), and asks them: will you go to a gay party? parade? The answers are strikingly unanimous: “I’m not interested in this,” “There’s no need to draw attention to us again,” and even like this: “In Russia, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a homosexual or not, the main thing is to stick to the oil pipe.” This is where any director will give up. And only some foreigner, who was hit in the ear on Tverskaya, shouts in despair: “Look at the streets of Moscow! What has she turned into?! This is not a place of tolerance, this is not a place of freedom, this is not democracy!” There was simply no person in Russia who could utter such words.
After such a fiasco of an attempt to encourage Russians to take a civic position, the organizers of the Berlinale are naturally irritated. “Do you want to fucking suck on an oil pipe? Well, suck it, and we’ll hold the festival here without you.” Under these conditions, even a seemingly win-win film by a Western director about Anna Politkovskaya was not invited to the Berlinale.
And one more news of the same direction. The Edinburgh Film Festival has rescheduled to June 19-28. Do you know what this means? This means that the Moscow International Film Festival, which has been held at this time for many years, may simply not receive festival copies (usually one or two of them) of the latest films from Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. First, the films will go to Edinburgh, and from there straight to Karlovy Vary. By the way, the Scots consulted with the Czechs whether the postponement would interfere with them, although in this case the dates do not even overlap. And we had no one to consult with, even if we wanted to. Every year the festival begins its real work only three to four months before the opening.
What did Berlin get from Russia? A pretty “Mermaid” at the opening of “Panorama”, invited on the wave of success at the Sundance Festival. And a completely new film - “Nirvana” by Igor Voloshin (starring the hardly recognizable Olga Sutulova, Artur Smolyaninov, Maria Shalaeva, Mikhail Evlanov). The Hollywood Reporter has already dubbed the film “a curiosity in the style of cyberpunk kitsch.”
Kitsch is not kitsch, but it looks a lot like a comic book. Even the director himself says in an English press release that “every character was conceived and created like Mickey Mouse.” St. Petersburg punks, dressed in fantastically beautiful costumes, scurry around the dilapidated interiors of the 18th century, die of love and drugs, dream of going to the village “where there are cows and those, what’s their name, goats.” Every hairstyle is a work of art, every remark is a sharply sharpened knife, every action is a change of fate. Everything is bright, decisive and much larger than life.
One small detail in Voloshin’s film attracts attention, a seemingly insignificant technical detail. It is fundamentally impossible to accurately determine the duration of the film. It seems like our days, on the other hand, 18-year-old girls remember water with syrup for three kopecks. It seems that a couple of times one of the heroines appears with something similar to a mobile phone, but not a single modern car is ever seen in the frame. It seems that everything is tied to modern club music, and in the finale the Atmosphere of the great Ian Curtis, who died in the 80s, sounds.
It turns out interesting. One of the most talented and promising young directors, famous for his short films, had to erase the signs of everyday life from the film. To tell something about time and about yourself, it was necessary to make this time abstract, and dress up the characters in incredible costumes and put into their mouths lines that would sound ridiculous in life and in a realistic film. It was necessary to go as far as possible from society into the depths of individual worlds, because it seems that this is the only way today we can achieve the right tone. What kind of “large-scale social canvas” is this...