Translated material
Anton Dolin. Cinema-31: Movement
To the release of the films " In the Depart! ", " Traffic " and " Requiem by dream "
Almost simultaneously (two - for one day, another one after a couple of weeks) three films are released on the same topic: drugs and drug addiction. In each case, a special drug status is declared - "something more than just a potion for artificial stimulation." Three fundamentally different approaches, oddly enough, are formed in a completely integral picture, the viewer is proposed to consider the phenomenon at three levels - it is familiar to him or not - and draw his conclusions.
Style
British-Irlandic "in a gap!" (In the original, the film is called Human Traffic - alas, in the Russian translation, the similarity of the names was not able to beat in such a clearly) was set by the director of Wales Justin Kerrigan based on his own life experience; He is a young man, immersed with his head in a club drug and musical subculture and seeking to transfer it to the screen. It turns out to be quite successful with him, in places even famously. In the center of the film, five characters: a cocked blonde jeep, immersed in the "sexy paranoia" (he is sure that drugs provoke early impotence); his acquaintance, independent Lula (experiences the betrayal of the next boyfriend); Black Vinyls merchant, merrycock (suspects his girlfriend Nina in betrayal); Nina herself (suffering at his work in McDonald's) and MOFF, a mined -desired tablet, a good friend (endless problems with parents promoting a healthy lifestyle). Five friends are waiting for only one thing - Friday evening, when you can meet and roll to the club to return to ordinary life only by Monday. "In a gap!" - The story about two and a half days of the weekend. The straightforwardness of the story - at first it was, and then there was that - it was brightened up by the variety of cinemas used, of which the main one - carried on the shield by Irwin Welsh and Danny Boyle ( Trainspoting ). Clip installation, constantly sounding huz-music, rapid and “scraper” rewinding of the frame back and forth, a sunsid comment and unpretentious youth humor make the film a typical work of the late 90s. The question is one thing - why to shoot another film about this?
About this - in the sense, about the generation X or Y, or whatever it is also called there. As the source said, the meaning of which was subsequently distorted more than once, the problem is that the “new lost generation” is forced to go to work, obey “macrat” or trade jeans in supermarkets, dreaming of personal freedom only at night and on weekends. In these conditions, in fact, drugs turn into the only possible key to the doors of freedom. O'Kay, let it be. It would seem that only two artistic and journalistic approaches to a conversation about drugs are possible: to represent them in the form of an abyss where a teenager (the same tragic Trainspoting ), buried with his head in a disgustingly banal life), or represent the drug as a method of creative stimulation in the same boring and belonging to the adult literature cannot but rush. Kerrigen offers the third option in which drugs themselves become everyday and boring practice. More precisely, not everyday, but a “weekend”: Saturdays and Sundays are a little less often in life than everyday life, but they also inevitably advance several times a month.
In this film, no one dies of breaking (or from bullets of evil policemen), everything goes its own way, a romance is tied up at the jeep with Lulu, and Moff finds a companion with whom he discusses all night why all the heroes of the Star Wars are obsovated in dust, and the audience does not notice this. In other words, we are part of the ordinary life of the average representatives of British youth. It is not recommended to look at it within an hour and a half, it is not recommended to draw conclusions. Drugs here are routine or, to say softer, a lifestyle, perceived consciously and without excessive emotions. Justin Kerrigen claims: stop making a problem out of nothing, know how to evaluate someone else's style (or look from the side at your own) and leave pathos to someone else.
System
The “traffic” by Stephen Sodaberg became one of the most significant cinemas of the year in the United States - it can at least say that only this film of all Oscar finalists should be taken seriously ( which academics, however, did - five Oscars and four films). The “traffic” was removed based on the television series, which is symptomatic: documentary telehyntonation remained at the basis of stories told by Sodaberg - there are three of them in the film - despite the fact that the language that these stories are told fully belongs to the cinema. Obviously, it was this quite original combination that made academics award the film for the adapted script and directing. Truffic could not become the best film of the year on Oscars - otherwise the jury would be accused of excessive political correctness and following the hard course of the new president. By the way, such an accusation would be in vain, since Sodaberg (who tried in life, as he stated in Berlin, almost all drugs) holds neutral intonation throughout the film. If "in a gap!" He shows the life of a drug addict from the inside, urging not to demonize ecstasies, then the “traffic” demonstrates the system outside, not specifically exposing anyone, but trying to show how merchants, consumers, politicians and taxpayers are linked to each other.
There are drugs - the style of existence, here is a fundamental chip of a huge state (at times interstate) system. Soderberg brilliantly demonstrates this by building his film exclusively on the unity of the topic and, at the same time interspersing the episodes of one short story with episodes of another, creating a whole fabric of the story about one phenomenon. At the same time, the characters of the three short stories are not familiar with each other and, moreover, all three stories develop in completely different aesthetic spaces. Washington, about Judge Wakefield ( Michael Douglas ), who was designed to fight drugs in the territory of the entire state, and then found out that his daughter was a drug addict, was decided in contrasting clear tones reminiscent of The Limey (in Russian translation - "Englishman") of the same director.
The stereotypical role of Douglas, in life - a lawyer or a businessman, is not annoying, as well as the races from the offices of the White House to the slums of drug addicts, according to which the only daughter of the hero wanders and he himself after her. It’s simply in accordance with the principle of contrast that the authors of the film show the front side and the inside, each of which ceases to look so unambiguous in the light of the other. The cornerstone of the Hollywood problem cinema is exposed: the a priori denial of those minuses that are not visible on the screen. Therefore, Douglas-Ueikfield and the judge that is forced to balanced on the verge of personal and public in order to judge and determine who is to blame. The final verdict is all the more interesting: instead of printing insidious and self -loving politicians (okay, the usual viewer himself understands that they are to blame, and not black drug dealers), the irreconcilable judge simply leaves his position, preferring a high position in the hall of the provincial society of anonymous alcoholics.
Drugs in "traffic" - not possessing qualities in itself a measure of human qualities, the main element of the structure of society. In the second, California, stories solved in oversaturated, excessive, as in a dream, flowers, Katherine Zeta-Jones plays a pregnant wife-beautiful wife of a large businessman, who was suddenly arrested for the spread of drugs. The heroine is trying to turn to the lawyer and friend of her husband ( Dennis Cueide ) for help, but he shrugs. Then she decides to take things into her own hands and hires a killer to destroy the only witness of the prosecution. Soderberg continues to weigh the correctness of both sides, alternately showing a tearful beauty with a stomach and a little son nearby and a foolish simpleton-narcodile, who is guarded by two of the same simpleton-policeman. As a result, the decisive Helena achieves his own, and one of the police officers bursts into her estate ... to avenge the partner who died along the way? By no means. In order to glue the "bug" to the bustle to the double bed of happy spouses. The wheel of Fortune continues to rotate, and all who wants to live rotate it involuntarily.
The third plot, Mexican, the most expressive, is solved in a black-and-yellow desert style. The incredible success of the protagonist of this story, the policeman Havier Rodriguez performed by Benisio Del Toro (Oscar for the male support of the second -plan, a male role in Berlin, awards of the US film critics association, US national film critics, and the US actors guild), we can easily explain. The charm of a pretty handsome man (the Latin analogue of our Sergey Bodrov Jr. ) in the context of the rigid and scorched history of the drug dealer on the scorched Mexican land, where it is impossible to trust anyone and where for the sake of the Golden Dream - the players for baseball players illuminated by American lanterns - Rodriguez has to betray a single friend, produces a magnetic effect on the audience, produces a magnetic effect, produces a magnetic effect, produces a magnetic effect, Forcing to finally think: "Is it worth it?" As in Erin Brochovich , with the help of precisely designed, not technological, but ideological installation (the installation prize is the most honored of the Oscars of the film), the director unobtrusively leads the observer to the annoying “public” issue - whether it is ecology or drugs - forcing him to solve for himself, without an unambiguous impulse from the screen. Soderberg says: keep in mind that you are also part of this system.
Symbol
The film that I already wrote about , the “Requiem of the Dream” of one of the most talented directors from the latest generation of American independent Darren Aronofsky , is not included in the clip of festival paintings of the second link (like “In a gap!”), Nor problematic serious films (like “traffic”), it will not be suitable for young extremes (for them the film is too much Didactic), nor a serious adult filmmakers (for them he is too young). However, it is this picture, set according to the fashion novel, Hubert Selby, that builds drugs to the level of a universal symbol. Here is an explanation of why people who have never encountered drugs in life make films about them or, at least, such films are watching. Drugs of "Requiem" - a fake indulgence, a road to an invented person and therefore a deceptive dream. Aronofsky in the company with Kronos-Quartet (minimalist, combining piercing violin passages with an electron-depressive rhythmic basis music-one of the strongest aspects of the picture) sings a waste prayer to all human dreams, ruthlessly burying them in the cold ash of skepticism clothed in the beautiful and frighteningly brutal images.
Sarah Goldfarb (almost the best role of the famous Ellen Berstin , deservedly nominated for Oscars and undeservedly ignored), a single mother living in a hostel for pensioners does not pay for drug addiction (for the time being, she does not even know that she takes not simple losing weight pills), but for empty hopes for a brilliant future, expressed in a constant look of aggressive television shows and the desire to get there. The reckoning is cruel - severe madness and lobotomy in a local hospital. Her son and his beautiful girlfriend are paid not for heroin, but for an attempt to control the surrounding reality (for him - specify with drugs, for her - to save money for her own store), for illusion. He was destined to prison, gangrene and an operation to remove his hand, she is participating in wild orgies for a handful of dollars. So, on the one hand, the director shows that anything can become a drug and, first of all, false ideas about something, and on the other hand, brutally punishes those who decide to give in to these ideas. Aronofsky repeats: a drug is your dream of the best that will cost you dearly.
In this sense, drug addicts are all. Which, however, does not indicate the futility of treatment.