“On Saturday” by Alexander Mindadze

Alexander Mindadze’s drama “On Saturday” is dedicated to the events of 25 years ago, when a disaster occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, comparable in scale to the bombing of Hiroshima. The real extent of the danger is accidentally discovered by a young party worker, Valery, who finds himself bound by an order from the leadership to keep what happened in the strictest confidence. All he can do is flee the city, taking his beloved girl with him.

“On Saturday” is Mindadze’s second directorial work. The film is not a chronicle of the tragic events of the Chernobyl accident, it is a human drama, a film “about the fatal impossibility of a person’s escape from what constitutes his essence.”

How does a person behave when he learns that trouble has happened? Why does he continue to cling to life even after he realizes that it is over. Valery could leave the city, but first he runs to the women's dormitory to take with him the girl Vera, with whom he had no relationship before. He acts instinctively, almost without realizing his actions. Together they hurry to the station, but are late for the train because Vera’s heel breaks. There is still a lot of time before the next train, you can have time to buy new shoes, pick up Vera’s passport from friends-musicians who are “showing off” at a Komsomol wedding, linger there, and in the end feel the impossibility of getting out of hell, the impossibility of canceling life.

The main role in the new film was played by Anton Shagin , whom Mindadze even called his “co-author”: “This great actor composed himself and lived a life in the film that he had never lived before.”

Alexander Mindadze has been working successfully in the genre of “cinema about nerves” for a long time. In his scripts, the heroes are always characterized by inhuman anguish, running without a specific goal, throwing, and inability to survive pain. Nervous laughs, incoherent dialogues, unfinished thoughts, sudden mood swings, screaming.

The action takes place almost in real time. Before us are the throwing of suicide bombers, who prefer not to believe in what happened, to be in the dark. Those who do not understand the scale of the tragedy are almost no different from those who already know. The heroes behave stupidly, in their every action there is a tragic doom. Having learned about the incident, the main character runs around the city, and the musicians continue the performance, but close the windows and drink “deactivator” (red wine), as if they could save themselves from radiation in this way, then they divide the money they earn, run for drinks again, delay their escape, which, obviously, will not take place. Life stops, but a person continues to cling to what he is used to, as if he wants to breathe before death.

All this could have been in abundance in the film, the material was powerful, the script, published six months ago in the magazine “Iskusstvo Kino”, took you by the throat and shocked you. In the film, the nervous camera of operator Oleg Mutu tries to convey a feeling of anxiety and hopelessness, the internal tension of the characters. But, unfortunately, one Romanian genius is not enough to drive the viewer into a cage.

It's not that the heroes are indistinct - there are no people here, there are shadows. And it’s not that the dialogues are indistinct - there are no phrases, there are fragments of words. Alexander Mindazde's directorial debut , Breakaway , which also talks about human behavior after a disaster, was much criticized for its lack of clarity. But in “Separation” there were real nerves, an incredible strain. Kishchenko was so truthful there. The “separation” was heartbreaking and exhausting. The film “Minnesota” by Andrei Proshkin based on the script by Mindadze , which was so unfairly quiet in our cinema, also made us tremble. In the second directorial work of Alexander Anatolyevich , unfortunately, the intensity is much less. However, the film is definitely worth watching. It forces the soul to work, turns it inward, makes it look for its pain points. And this is worth a lot.