Death and homeland on "Kinotavr"

The first film of the competitive program “ Kinotavr ”, “Gromozeca” by Vladimir Cotta is a movie that you need to give your friends-foreigners who have passed the initial level of acquaintance with Russia. That is, to those who have already parted with the children's faith in a sudden meeting with a white bear on the street, but still have not lost interest in the Russian soul.

Heroes are three men in forty: a surgeon, taxi driver and a policeman, three aged superheroes from childhood (electronics, Pinocchio and a red cap), one killer, one pornstar and one damn Russian winter. Dr. Kaminsky cuts appendixes (not always successful), he is heavily experienced by his own cancer and is burdened by a novel with an assistant. The pig -like son is rude to Captain Gromov, his wife is cheating (with electronics), he is not respected by hooligans and bosses. Fate was not kindly joked at the taxi driver Mozerov. Trying to once brighten up loneliness with beer and porn, he, turning on the player, did not see at the wrong time that his daughter was completely adult.

Vladimir Kott sews a gloomy and claustrophobic world of his heroes from the scraps of the Soviet past: from wallpaper with a suspiciously familiar pattern, from dirty elevators and cramped, like elevators, kitchens, from the same old cups with chips. But even such relatives and acquaintances, these items at Kott, as if created from antimatter. Gather them in the next volume of “M endo” Leonid Parfyonov, everyone would have burst into tears of emotion. But in the "Gromoose" these signs of the past era are not charged with the nostalgic energy of childhood, but by the curse of the fallen regime. From him - all the misfortunes of the doctor, driver and cop in the new life. It was his ideologists at first forced the then boys to believe in the romance of socialism, and then disappeared, leaving them to deal with themselves. And while Gromov, Mozers and Kaminsky pretended that nothing was happening, their children found themselves in crime and porn industry.

From the consciousness of their worthlessness, the heroes cry all the time, even when they eat or call whores. And only when all together they meet ritually in the bathhouse and tell each other about things - everyone says: normally. Therefore, apparently, that for years it has been a well -educated ban to show others his weakness.

If abroad did not exist, the “thunderbar” could not be removed. For us, the problems of extra people, overcoming the Soviet heritage, a pale chicken in an aluminum pan-this is something from a textbook, boring and self-sufficient. In fact, all this can only hook a foreigner with taste for ethnography. This is him, and not our curiosity will be satisfied with the pattern of the desktop oilcloth, his nerves will tickle Russian sex under the “kalinka-rasp”, his fears about the abnormality of the Soviet regime will be confirmed. We will show him how the country reluctantly goes to capitalism, how our outwardly harsh men sob with powerlessness, how endless and dreary Russian colds are unbearable.

And he, this curious foreigner, will look at all this: at the oilcloths, at the cops, for the winter, for men - he will shout and change his mind to attack us. “Well, to hell,” he will think, “let them themselves somehow. Girls, hot soups and sleds are probably in other northern countries. ” Russia will be saved - and all thanks to Vladimir Kotta. Because if he did not mean this, then it is completely incomprehensible why he was generally taken for this project.

The second competitive film - the species “Homeland or Death” by Vitaly of Mansky’s strategic cinema of Cotta. The film is notable not only in that it also calls, albeit involuntarily, to think about the fate of Russia - because the movie is not about Russia, but about Cuba. This is a full -length documentary, which is also taken to the camera, looks better than much of what was in the competition. Despite the camera, for documentary, for dense control of the Cuban KGB, with which every breath had to coordinate.

“Homeland or Death” is a non -game cinema, there are no professional actors in it, and most people in the frame are diabolical cinematic ordinary residents of Cuba, engaged in their affairs. It is not worth it, however, to think that since this is a documentary, then we are shown the truth and nothing but the truth. In the picture of the shocking no less than the beautiful, but the most “tin”, as the Mansky material that did not enter the final version, remained on the hard drive.

We can’t see, for example, opening the scenes where some Kubin religious ritual falls into the lens: people tie huge cobblestones and crawl from the capital to pray. They crawl, wash the palms and knees in the blood, and stray dogs are spinning around them. Not because they count on something, but simply because they are wild creatures. Instead, the film begins with a recording of how several Cuban girls are twisted in front of a webcam. If Mansky left only this episode, he would probably have won a short meter competition. But his film is not three minutes, but an hour and a half of overseas beauty. There are many excellent shots, such as, for example, where a one -legged guy makes an amazing knee with his lady or where the pressure of water on a flooded embankment breaks off and throws the lid of the sewer hatch, and in the foreground the lazy dogs press and knead the paws. But, as is often the case with documentary cinema, all together the scenes do not work out in a single story.

In general, we observe the “just life” of Cubans. She, as in the “thunderbird”, has not quite a commodity. At the same time, unlike the Cotta film, some natural magnetism is not removed from it surgically, that which allows even a chromium skinny street dog to look like a milaga. In fact, except for the climate, in Cuba it lives much more lousy than in Russia. When the union broke up and stopped buying Cuban sugar, on the “Island of Freedom” it was not only up to patterned oilcloths - any visiting Greengo could buy a girl here for a disrepair from his hotel. And nothing - no one sobs into a pan with chicken there and does not try to be more unhappy than others. Cubans, when they do not work, are dancing. And unemployment there is wow.

It is possible, by the way, that the dancers themselves, having looked at the “Island of Freedom”, would laugh louder than we ourselves on a “thunderbar”. There is nothing funnier than looking at yourself from the side. It’s good that, in addition to men battered by life, you can sometimes see the affordable black beauties in the cinema.