Translated material
Game on the needle
“Vise” by Valery Todorovsky on Moscow screens
In a hot seaside city lives - and lives well - a successful young DJ Denis (Maxim Matveev). He loves music, knows how to command the audience with its help, he has a completely fulfilled personal life, in general, what more could you ask for. But there can never be too much of a good thing, and at one far from wonderful moment, Denis needed money, and he couldn’t find anything better than to try to earn it on drugs.From that moment on, the vice stated in the film's title quickly and rather painfully began to tighten - on the one hand, he is forced to work for himself by the local drug lord Werner (Fyodor Bondarchuk), and the further they go, the closer and more contradictory their relationship becomes. On the other hand, precisely at the moment when Denis and Werner become almost friends (as far as possible in such a situation), the DJ-dealer begins to put pressure on the heavy drinker (and in the past he was completely on the needle), but completely adamant in on matters of law, Major Dudaitis (Alexey Serebryakov). And it is almost impossible for Denis to make an unambiguous choice in this situation: the clamp of fate, and even generously sprinkled with white powder, is so easy that desire alone cannot be loosened. Therefore, the matter ends, and ends in great blood.
The premiere of “The Vise” took place this summer at Kinotavr, and, frankly speaking, it was not a special event - the main competition intrigue was still swirling around completely different films. However, now that Valery Todorovsky’s film can be perceived not in a festival context, but in a broader distribution context, this “rave-style tragedy” looks much more interesting. Rarely good in picture and rhythm, the film turns out to be quite a worthy competitor to similar Western films that appear on our screens. Some straightforwardness and didacticism of the main message, which at one time disappointed some early viewers, suddenly becomes completely organic.
Perhaps "Vise" is the most "foreign" of our recent films; A movie has been made in which the Western approach to the topic of drug addiction (in the light of which it is primarily a social, not a medical evil) is organically combined with the “there” form. From the point of view of visuals and color scheme, I remember more than once, and convincingly, “Traffic”, and “Heat”, and “The Departed”, and “Bitch-Love”, and “City of God” (and in general the new wave of hard Latin American movie). Lately, only a lazy director (or one who doesn’t like anyone’s cinema other than his own) doesn’t try to fill the film with allusions to fashionable or cherished films, but in “Vise” this for once does not look like a quotable skit, but is perceived as conscious artistic technique.
The actors also look very decent. The leading actor, debutant Maxim Matveev, may well turn into our Orlando Bloom over time; Fyodor Bondarchuk once again showed that his acting skills can, if desired, go far beyond the scope of buffoonish cameos (like another drug dealer he played from Dmitry Meskhiev’s “7 Cabins”); Alexey Serebryakov plays almost a “bad major” (by analogy with the hero of Harvey Keitel from Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant”). We can compare for a long time, but at the same time, oddly enough, the hypothetical remake of “The Vise” is seen in the West with much greater ease than it might first seem.