Translated material
In the weight of a fly
On Russian screens - the comedy “From 180 and Above”
A new Russian film is coming out on “Shadow Boxing,” albeit in the flyweight category. Against the current favorite from Central Partnership, he is being put into the box office ring by Gemini Film, which has just screened The Turkish Gambit, and before that Night Watch. There is natural competition between the two distributors: “TsPSh”, having started with “cinema from the director of “Brigade” with the support of the “Russia” channel, is already preparing a whole team for release - “Escape”, “9th Company”, and in the distance looms the Slavic fantasy “Wolfhound” " “Gemini,” however, has a truly powerful “State Councilor” in its immediate plans, so the current rivalry is only a light friendly meeting, especially since “180”’s original circulation was half that of what is now customary for blockbusters...The film “From 180 and Above” was invented and produced by the director of the Moscow Film Festival, Renat Davletyarov. The script was ordered from the famous film playwright Yuri Korotkov, and the actor and TV presenter Alexander Strizhenov, who has only one and not very successful comedy (co-authored with Sergei Ginzburg) “View from Above,” took on the film.
The plot that inspired the team to create the film is simple and unpretentious: a short man dreams of hooking up with a long-legged beauty - this will raise his self-esteem to the skies and get rid of his second-class complex. Solving this problem occupies the hero throughout the film, made up of a long series of short episodes-sketches of modern glamorous life and its underbelly. Each beauty that the junior administrator of the fitness club Kostik tries to invite on a date has her own life, her own man and her own problems. Sometimes the stories about them are very funny, sometimes so-so, but on the whole, against the general background of our cinema, comedy attracts people with its lack of ambition and obvious harmlessness. A rare case, by the way, for the current domestic comedy: in the film there is no forcedness, accusatoryness, obvious vulgarity and generally nothing besides the main goal - to tell a funny story about our life today, as fun as possible.
Alas, director Alexander Strizhenov is not yet very good at working with actors: those of them who can come up with a role for themselves do it successfully, those who cannot, overact and miss the mark. Of course, with more ingenuity it was possible to make the film more interesting and even more poetic, but it is much more realistic - and we see this from time to time - to make a movie of much worse quality.
But several quite nice techniques have been invented, the ending only seems predictable - at the very end the plot does a kind of entrechat and turns it into a new twist. And Moscow appears in the film as a frivolous, but not disgusting city, in which funny ordinary people live - many things in their lives are unclear, but they continue to hope for happiness. And Evgeniy Stychkin, who played a simple-minded, but good-natured and completely non-aggressive guy, can be congratulated on his successful solution to the problem of a modern hero - I personally like this image much more and scares him much less than other options.
By the way, provincial distributors, according to Renat Davletyarov and the management of Gemini, were very interested in this simple film. Apparently, they assumed that for ordinary cinema visitors, a cheerful domestic comedy is exactly what is missing - and from the first day of release they decided to replace “Shadowboxing” in large halls with “180 and above”. This is where the fun begins.