How not to love your native "Moscow"
Alexander Zeldovich removed the epitaph of the nineties
In Moscow, in an atmosphere of slight excitement that befell the cultural scene, Alexander Zeldovich’s film “Moscow” based on the script by Vladimir Sorokin was finally shown - so far the only artistic statement of the generation of forty-year-olds that claimed to be epic.

The film has a significant flaw that the viewer should be prepared for: its first half is much more sluggish and slow than the second. Remember the Hollywood practice when a specialist is invited to edit a film, but the director is not allowed into this process. In the case of “Moscow,” it is clear both the objective benefit that scissors would bring to the film and the subjective impossibility of using this tool. The picture took a long time to make, obviously not easy, and also with an absolutely stellar cast - and how can you decide to suddenly castrate this beloved baby, dock his tail, or even cut his hair?
The script “Moscow” has been known for a long time - it was published in 1997 in the anthology “Film Scripts”, was included in Sorokin’s “red-yellow” two-volume set and, thus, belongs to the Russian postmodernist canon. The literary background of “Moscow” is Chekhov’s sisters, who were given a gift by a malicious demon who heard their moan “To Moscow, to Moscow!” Here they are in Moscow - a hundred years later. And they hear the new Lopakhin promise: “We will destroy all of Europe!” After which he is immediately killed.
The metaphysical value of the picture is that the nineties of Moscow, their pathos and insanity are shown with exactly the emotion that they evoked - with melancholy and disgust. In any case, I have not encountered any different feelings among people of my generation; another thing is that few people dared to express them. A scant and greedy feast, a series of drunken nights and gray awakenings, clumsy consumerism and a complete absence of abstract thoughts, in a word, hysteria that gripped the whole city.
A more difficult issue is the aesthetics of the film. Probably, if “Moscow” had been filmed faster and released, so to speak, in the nineties, the film would not have acquired that undeniable shade of archaism that now, in the fall of 2000, is striking. “'Moscow' is absolutely not an everyday picture,” says director Alexander Zeldovich. “Every thing, every detail of the interior is removed from its everyday context and serves as a sign of itself. A tuxedo is not just a tuxedo, but a Tuxedo; ice is not just ice, but Ice.” . Well, the public has already gotten used to tuxedos - or, perhaps, they just don’t care about tuxedos anymore.
Moreover, Sorokin’s dialogues, read not as satire in the spirit of Zoshchenko, but as a Chekhovian drama, also look archaic. Sorokin may be the last logocentric author, but still a logocentric one. And the changed context of time suggests a slightly different emphasis: language is tired of listening to itself, language, so to speak, simply wants to serve as a means of communication. And so, in the obvious contradiction between the demands of cinema (where even in a tuxedo with a capital “M” there is someone who is given the main attention of the viewer) and the subtly absurd dialogues (which turn everyone who participates in them into cretins) lies the breakdown of “Moscow” . When Sorokin’s text is uttered, the cinema seems to disappear.
In the most spectacular sequence of the film, which tells the story of the suicide of one of the characters, he packs a suitcase, stuffing it with English detectives, and goes to the springboard on Sparrow Hills. He climbs the endless stairs and sits down halfway to snack on some salted nuts from a bag. Then he sits down on his suitcase and rushes down the acceleration mountain. Is this some kind of metaphor? No, it's just beautiful. There is not a single word in this episode.
And the most effective monologue of the film begins with the words “I, too, had to look in a person.” It further turns out that the search was for a man who swallowed a diamond in order to smuggle it across the border: “I don’t know why he cut into an oak tree. It was already like jellied meat. I didn’t even need a knife. I searched in it with my hands.” The idiocy of colloquial speech (which, in fact, is what Sorokin is talking about) is almost not played out in the film “Moscow” - if you started messing with it, the film would probably turn into a radio play.
What's the end result? Grandiose components: music by Leonid Desyatnikov (buy the soundtrack!), acting, camera work. But they won’t love “Moscow”: the film is too cynical to be funny; too romantic to be touching. Too true to like, too life-like to derive a single general meaning from it.
MIKHAIL Kommersant-NOVIKOV

Newspaper “Kommersant” No. 192 dated 10/13/2000, p. 13