Translated material
April Theses
The film by Konstantin Murzenko was finally shown in Moscow
Yesterday, journalists were finally shown the painting “April” by Konstantin Murzenko. Until now, the directorial debut of the cult domestic film playwright could be seen at the Vyborg festival “Window to Europe”, and the film will be released in February 2002 - then the time will come for serious analyzes and reviews, but first impressions are important today.When the project was just beginning, Murzenko, I remember, presented his film on the pages of the Session magazine. He quoted St. Petersburg necrorealist artist Andrei Mertvy and promised that “the film will roar.” However, viewers should not be afraid and cover their ears in fearful anticipation. The film evokes musical associations of a completely different kind, from a different, so to speak, opera. It’s not the eardrum-rending howl and crash that comes to mind, but the fatal trills of Charles Bronson’s harmonica from “Once Upon a Time in the West”: a slowly melting lullaby before eternal sleep, the Turkish delight trills of the oriental stage, invariably accompanying lyrical scenes in aniline Hong Kong action films. “April,” a film surprisingly dense and at the same time transparent, does not resemble anything other than itself, even like “Mama, Don’t Cry,” a landmark film based on Murzenkov’s script, the discoveries of which could be multiplied with no less success ( Guy Ritchie launched an entire television series based on his “Cards, Money...” - and nothing, it looks quite good). But for Murzenko it turned out differently. He preferred a risky, but extremely personal statement to a step that was calibrated from the point of view of success. His film is superficially simple, but this simplicity is deceptive. An ordinary person who has never heard of postmodernism and other refined joys, once in the hall, will inevitably slap himself on the forehead, remembering the textbook phrase of Arkady Dmitrievich Severny: “Oh my God, the song is about us!” And the sophisticated esthete in the next chair will quietly melt, seeing how organically, smoothly, and in watercolors the best and most beloved cinematic colors are mixed on the palette-screen, passed through the prism of modern domestic life by the director-cinephile. The melancholic drive of Jean-Pierre Melville's classic "polars" and the exposed urban nerve of early Martin Scorsese, the matte calm of Jim Jarmusch's urban ballads and the "vidiotic" daring frenzy of Quentin Tarantino, the oriental cruelty of John Woo's armor-piercing ballets and the alienation of Wong Kar-wai's eternally neon crucifixes... “April” is a movie that confuses the tracks and confuses, but all the sophisticated balancing act leads only to the fact that in the labyrinth of criminal intrigue, at the very end of the endless hospital corridor, a light suddenly turns on. Everything in the world was forgotten, my heart froze in my chest.