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"Red Belt" by David Mamet on Moscow screens
Jiu-jitsu master Mike Terry (Chitel Ejifor) barely runs a small gym and flatly refuses to improve his well-being by performing in commercial tournaments. In order to make ends meet, you need to take out a loan, but Mike would rather commit hara-kiri for himself, turning a deaf ear to his wife’s quite reasonable questions about “what should the families of fighters eat while they themselves maintain purity of thoughts.” However, the situation may change after Mike rescues movie celebrity Chet Frank (Tim Allen), a heavy-drinking artist, who entered the drinking establishment without his wife and security and immediately ran into trouble, at a nearby bar. As a thank you, Chet invites Mike to the set of his new film about Desert Storm, and everything seems to be going well, but suddenly it turns out that most of what has happened to Terry lately are just elements of a cunning intrigue, which was started solely for the sake of Mike entered the ring...A few years ago, having learned that David Mamet was going to make a film called “Red Belt,” one could have decided that it was much more likely to be devoted to the problems of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation electorate in central Russia than to martial arts. Mamet is a classic of modern American drama, an excellent director, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the play “Glengarry Glenn Ross”, which is truly close to genius (filmed in the early 90s by James Foley), twice nominated for an Oscar, translator of Chekhov’s plays and a master of enchanting structured and rhythmic dialogues. Nevertheless, everything happened as it happened: impressed by the passion of his friend, actor Ed O'Neill, for the Brazilian version of jiu-jitsu, Mamet himself infiltrated this world, began training and even earned a belt (though only a purple one). The result was a film in the unique, mind-boggling genre of “David Mamet martial arts drama.”
Despite the participation of almost a dozen professional fighters from different schools (the Professor who came to the tournament is played by Dan Iosanto himself - one of the few real students of Bruce Lee, who received the wisdom of the “way of the leading fist” first hand), there are practically no actual fights in the film -- those few fights that do take place are filmed casually and are most often shown on monitor screens or from security cameras (and even though some in the film claim that these recordings look “more cool than the Titanic”, this not quite so - with all due respect to Mamet, Cameron’s blockbuster looked, whatever one may say, more impressive). The rest of the time, in “Red Belt” a conflict unfolds that is well known to consumers of hand-to-hand cinema - the conflict of sports honor and unscrupulous cleanliness, the samurai principles of fighting, the other “way of the warrior” with all its stops. However, if in an ordinary film, where fighting reflections served only as a prelude to the invariably spectacular final battle, then “Red Belt”, in essence, is limited to them. And the background in maxims like “the enemy’s strength must be directed, and not resisted”, “any competition makes you weaker”, “he who imposes a fight on the enemy also imposes a truce”, “a belt is needed only to hold up your pants” no need to search. Perhaps this is the first Mamet film, the ending of which becomes obvious within a quarter of an hour after the opening credits. Already in Mamet’s previous directorial work, “Spartan” with Val Kilmer, you had to remind yourself from time to time that you were watching this not bad, but lacking stars from the sky, thriller primarily because it was a David Mamet film, and therefore on it It's worth paying closer attention. In the case of the “Red Belt”, the same thought does not let go for a second. The name of the screenwriter and director looms invisibly but constantly in the corner of the screen, like a counter recording the time until the end of this already short film. But it's of little use.
The only explanation for the appearance of this picture is that Mamet was actually seriously imbued with jiu-jitsu and therefore is not able to squeeze out even the slightest bit of irony and detachment about it. A somewhat unexpected, but valid association is the behavior of Scientologist John Travolta, who invested in and played the main role in the film adaptation of the novel “Battlefield Earth” by Scientology founder Ron Hubbard (with well-known catastrophic consequences). Mamet, of course, acted much more subtly and refinedly. But the general meaning remained unchanged.