Mikhail Trofimenkov. Telekino from November 17 to 23

Telekino from November 17 to 23
Mikhail Trofimenkov

Publication date: November 17, 2000

A strange, imaginative week of television. Ghosts feel at ease. Event - "Manuscript found in Zaragoza" (Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie) (1965) (November 21 and 22, ORT, 12.45 ****) by the Polish classic Wojciech J. Has (1925-2000). Few people remember Has: he is in the shadow of Wajda, Munk, Kawalerowicz, despite the fact that his terrible film about alcoholism, Petla (1958), was one of the leading works of the Polish school . The event is not because one is supposed to mourn the death of an author who has just passed away, but because “The Manuscript” is one of the most bizarre, mysterious, esoteric European films that could compete on equal terms with the films of Bunuel. On the set, Has seemed to be possessed by the soul of the author of the novel he filmed, Jan Potocki (1761-1815), and this soul was crazy. Pototsky, writer, historian, geographer, adventurer (and in those days any traveler was an adventurer), author of the “Elementary History of the Peoples of Russia” (and the “Manuscript”, by the way, was first printed in St. Petersburg), knight of Malta, shot himself with a silver ball , which was previously blessed by the priest. The “Manuscript” is “a story about Kabbalists, robbers and ghouls,” as it is certified in the preface, a kind of “1001 Nights” of European romanticism, which inspired Pushkin’s poem “Alphonse Rides a Horse.” Its hero, who sets out on a journey across Spain on horseback, gets into the most incredible troubles, but at the decisive moment he falls asleep and invariably wakes up at a fork in the road, under a gallows with the bodies of the robber brothers, who change their location every time. In the book, romanticism seemed to anticipate surrealism, and in the film, the melancholic Polish confidence that history moves in a vicious circle was successfully combined with the experience of mature surrealism. Much of the credit for this goes to the leading actor, Poland's favorite Zbyszek, Zbigniew Cybulski (1927-1967), the terrorist Maciek from the great "Ashes and Diamonds" (Popiol i diament) by Andrzej Wajda. An actor and a person, he felt uncomfortable in films with “modern youth” themes and was in the right place only when he played romantics doomed to live in a non-romantic era. And he died, as befits an “extra” romantic, when, in the words of the critic Sergei Dobrotvorsky, “exhausted by vodka and fame,” he fell off the train steps he was trying to jump on.

Speaking of surrealism. On "Culture" - a short film by Pierre Prevert "Beautiful Paris" (Paris la Belle) (1959) (November 18, 22.05 ****) . Brother of the wonderful poet Jacques Prevert, he played one of the bandits in Buñuel's L'Age d'Or and directed a couple of hilarious surreal comedies. Also a man “from the shadows,” but no less worthy of attention than his older brother. “Beautiful Paris” is a documentary declaration of love for Paris, seen not from the standard tourist, glamorous gaze, but from a person accustomed to wandering at night and hanging over at dawn in the “belly of Paris.” Equally independent and ironic is the view of the New Wave pioneer Agnes Varda on the tourist Côte d'Azur in the film Towards the Côte d'Azur (Du Cote de la Cote) (1958), shown together with Prévert's Paris. Varda is also in the shadow - this time of her husband Jacques Demy, author of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (Les Parapluis de Cherbourg).

Paris generally favors directors with cute quirks. For example, in 1976, John Schlesinger directed the exemplary thriller “Marathon Man” (November 18, NTV, 22.45 ***) . Dustin Hoffman's kind-hearted hero, passionately practicing jogging in New York's Central Park, doesn't know that this passion will help him escape from the clutches of the hardened Nazi doctor (the aristocratic Laurence Olivier), who drilled him into as torture - a healthy tooth. But the most cinematic, mysterious, frightening episode of the film takes place precisely on the steps of the Grand Opera in Paris, where a severed head rolls at the feet of a frightened Manhattan intellectual. What distinguishes this film from other examples of the genre is its black, almost surreal sense of humor. In the first episode, an old Nazi dies of a heart attack while driving his car, outraged by the fact that he was cut off and overtaken by a half-dead Jew.

Nowadays, when surrealism has been consigned to the archives, a worthy measure of its strangeness is offered by directors who are indiscriminately registered in the department of cyberpunk. At first glance, David Cronenberg's film "ExistenZ" (1998) (November 18, RTR, 23.10 *****) is the most cyberpunk. It is completely unclear when the film begins and when the computer game invented by a certain Allegra Geller (the best actress of modern American cinema, Jennifer Jason Leigh) ends. Who really dies, who is loyal to friendship, and who works for the anti-cyber terrorist underground? Where does the body end and electronic gadgets begin, as always with Cronenberg, reminiscent of genitals and activated by masturbation? The special effects cost the director about a thousand dollars. Despite this, or rather because of this, the film burrows into your brain like an alien parasite. Obviously, the point is that Cronenberg treats virtual reality as “real” and makes a film in the genre of “through the looking glass” reportage.

The glorious representative of the younger generation of the Leningrad school, Dmitry Meskhiev, organically mixes everyday life and the other world in “American” (1998) (November 19, TVC, 21.45 ****) . It is customary to scold Meskhiev, and rightly so: from time to time he spoils his reputation as a true author by filming unimaginable commercial nonsense like the erotic “Bomb”. But in his “true” films (“Cynics”, “Over Dark Water”) he is surprisingly faithful to his author’s theme. This theme is the search for a woman, or rather, an attempt to reveal her secret. And the defeats that women always condemn men to, even at the cost of their own lives. Meskhiev managed to retell in his own way a story that cinema (including Fellini and Kusturica) has told thousands of times and will continue to tell forever. A provincial town (in this case in Russia, in the year of the 60th anniversary of the Great October Revolution), the first cigarette, spying on women in the bathhouse, wall-to-wall fights between districts, a dance floor (with the Pep-C group in male guise), in short , a boy's first encounter with death and love. The secret of the film’s charm is that Meskhiev tells the familiar love story to the smallest detail seriously, without bells and whistles and “postmodernism.” And cameraman Sergei Mochilsky develops a stylistic move, which consists in the fact that it’s as if they forgot to turn off the camera and it captures reality incompletely, fragmentarily. Each frame is subtly inventive, funny and beautiful. Pay attention not only to the talented Natalya Danilova in the title role, but also to the most amusing Alisa Borisovna Grebenshchikova Jr. as the school sex bomb Ogurts and the “hunger Kuzmich” Viktor Bychkov as the criminal Trofimov. And also give your attention to the strange and sad crime film of Vyacheslav Krishtofovich “Woman at Sea” (1992) based on the story by Leonid Borodin (November 20, RTR, 17.30 ***) .

╘ Mikhail Trofimenkov, 2000

╘ Publishing House "Kommersant", 2000