Igor Mantsov. Repentance

Repentance
Igor Mantsov

Publication date: March 9, 2004

On " again the 7th of March they showed " Pretty Woman with Gere and Julia Roberts. An elderly neighbor looked at the picture for the sixth time and justified herself right on the landing: “He gave her a million. I wish I had someone too...” The neighbor is distinguished by sober judgment. I am sincerely happy about the three hundred added to my pension. Doesn't believe in the charity of the rich at all. Committed to asceticism: ” “There is enough of everything .

He doesn't really mean money, no. Her "million" means infinite . Transcendent, if you like. The average person understands cinema more accurately than the intellectual. The average person is not shy about “moronic” melodramatic turns and primitive schemes: two or three people in touch mode are enough to describe the world universe.

The intellectual is passionate about the search for differences, the average person rightly hopes to recognize the universal in a local plot. An intellectual is by definition a voyeur. Dreams of distancing himself and peeking. Demonstratively and proudly, he does not recognize himself in either the bad or the good: “I am different!” On the contrary, the average person certainly wants to participate. Byron, Gere, Roberts, millionaire, cowboy or prostitute - the average person doesn't care. Adapts everywhere. Matches .

It’s time to understand: fiction cinema does not present the evil infinity of the material world, but the social imaginary . What we all already know, but don’t dare voice yet. Like music, movies are composed and played in the collective subcortex by the people. All that remains for a good cinematographer is to record and transfer to film. The bad one runs around with his individual, corporate or party fantasies. But no one watches such phantasms, not provided by the collective unconscious, more than once. In any case, he doesn’t discuss it with an elderly housewife on the stairs for half an hour.

However, there are movies that housewives can't handle. Especially the elderly. It happens that it is celebrated by both the Cannes Lions and the Oscars: a rare unanimity. " Invasion of the Barbarians " by Canadian Denis Arcand , a long-awaited triumph. Ten years ago, I convinced cinephiles that Arcand was no worse than Cronenberg and more relevant than Fellini, that his finest hour was ahead. Not so much a movie as an Act. The relevance of the film for today's Russia is unprecedented.

Filmmaking opportunities are limited in Canada. Arkan became famous back in the 60s, later producing the impeccable masterpiece “ The Collapse of the American Empire ,” but until recently he remained idle for a long time, alternating financial adventures with work on television. Hence the aesthetics of his paintings: chatty, stylized in the spirit of a one-dimensional television show, in the spirit of superficial sociological observation. Monologues about the meaning of life, betrayal and love, about historical conjuncture and generational differences, about Cioran and Marcuse . A diagram on a diagram and a stamp on a stamp? Undoubtedly. By meticulously selecting and skillfully comparing commonly used nonsense , Arkan achieves a new quality from the notorious cliches. It is worth watching how the playwright and director, a professional , overcomes the resistance of the collective body and, as if under torture, using exclusively formal means, forces the notorious body to speak! And about what? For example, about the betrayal and guilt of one’s generation. You won’t expect anything like this from ours. Even on the rack. Go-horde.

Let's call them the sixties, shall we? Let's. Not my whim, but a direct author's instruction. Here is a Catholic bishop grieving: “In ’66, in just a couple of months, all our churches were suddenly empty...” So, gathered at the bedside of the main character, who is rapidly dying of cancer, his friends and lovers reminisce: free love, relaxedness, fullness of life. Sexual revolution, Sartre, Mao, Godard.

I sincerely admit that at first I really liked this whole gop company! Worn, eaten by time and moths, they still radiate light, sparkle with optimism, scatter seeds of love for life. I envied this generation, this freedom, this feeling of being right. What can I say, a couple of years ago I myself admitted in print that I would give everything in the world for two young French girls: human, too human!

The most amazing, the most incredible thing in the picture is this. As soon as I unconditionally fell in love with the main character, the professor who slept with all his students, and his troubled friends, and his faded, but still irresistible peers, as soon as I took their side in an invisible duel with worthless children, Denis Arcand declared lynching and auto-da-fé. Secret switches were triggered, and the film, while outwardly remaining within the same framework, changed dramatically.

The “parents” are still the same: charming, life-loving, full-blooded romantics. The “children” are still the same: gloomy, aloof, nasty freaks. Look: the son of the main character, a workaholic from London, maddened by bank quotes, confident that money solves any problem. His bride, who hates the word “love”, does not believe the word “love”, pragmatically follows through life next to a rich workaholic. Another young heroine, the daughter of the professor's ex-girlfriend, a drug addict with bulging eyes, who cannot be relied on for anything. Bastards? Without any doubt. And yet, contrary to common sense, Arkan takes our side.

The post-war generation is a universal category. In some important ways, Soviets are not at all different from Western ones, despite the difference in wealth and the catastrophic difference in cultural level. Here is the formula of one Western humanitarian , which exhaustively describes the key conflict of both our time and the picture: “If you promise everyone a state pension, children will cease to be an insurance policy against old age . ”

Arkan tests the leftist fantasies of the socialist fathers for lice. The dying professor passionately fought for the nationalization of hospitals, and now, as if in revenge, his bed was installed almost in the passage corridor. But the unpleasant workaholic son instantly solves the problem by buying everything and everyone at the hospital. Money is also too human a category. What about socialism? More like superhuman.

Here it is, the paradox of Denis Arcand: “too lively” fathers cultivated such a dead philosophy that they turned their children into morons and cripples. Now half-dead children are forced to profess dubious values ​​​​like money, cynicism and drugs, as if pandering to the all-too-human nature of things. As if returning the world to balance.

It’s not that children are better than their fathers, no. Children, and Arkan insists on this, atone for their father’s undoubted guilt. Logically, guilt cannot be proven. Honest discussion on the topic is blocked by the dominant rhetoric, because the “father” is the one who holds symbolic power and, therefore, public speech. The only way out is repentance, the confession of the Father himself: “I’m guilty.” The life-lover and sixties-born Arkan kills the professor, his alter ego, leaving the children to move on with their lives. Only after this does the Son’s bride find the strength to whisper “I love” to him for the first time.

These are the “dumb” but piercing designs that are now being awarded in Cannes and Los Angeles. We, Soviets, remember the perestroika film " Repentance ", where the Father was thrown out of the grave by smug impostors. Finally feel the difference! Is it any wonder after this that the so-called perestroika has degenerated into a disgusting liberal farce?

The “father-son” formula problematizes the extremely pressing topic of inheritance of power and the accompanying rotation. Anthropologists have long rejected the common myth that children represent the highest value for humans. In fact, one’s own biological death is the most important event in this life for a person. A child, a son, performs an important compensatory function, continuing the biological body of the father. The love of a father for his son is problematic, because it is implicated in selfishness and horror of future non-existence. From this point of view, the already great picture of the Belgian Dardenne brothers “ The Son ” (2002), awarded at Cannes a year before “Invasion...”, is doubly interesting.

The father, a joiner and carpenter , undertakes to teach the craft to a 16-year-old boy who killed his own Son five years ago. "For what?!" - the ex-wife screams in horror, having become pregnant again, this time from her new husband. “I don’t know, ” answers the Father, who is denied biological continuation. “ I don’t know . ” He teaches skill, marveling at the selfishness and insanity of a teenager whose only regret is that he had to live in prison for five years.

Here is a diagram of a masterpiece: a person is confronted with the fact of his biological finitude. What should a person do now that there are no illusions left? - A man adopts a murderer, his absolute enemy. The one who marked his limit and poked his nose into nothingness .

Thus, the hero asserts the main, not obvious, function of the father. Father is an inalienable category, fully realizing itself only in the coordinates of responsibility . These are the lessons of three “provincial” directors: Arcand and the Dardennes. Unfortunately, this is not the case with us. We are big, our paternity presupposes blood, power, a rod, vodka, a squat. Lord, bring some sense to Russia.