Translated material
Relations of production
The Moscow Film Festival began in a businesslike manner
Nikita Mikhalkov, president of the Moscow International Film Festival, this time was without a scarf - a hitherto unchanged attribute of the opening ceremony. The tuxedo, the bow tie - everything was there, but the scarf was missing. Attentive observers should have already concluded from this fact alone that there have been changes in the regulations. However, the bow on the head of the president’s wife took its usual place, which should have reassured the public that the changes were not too serious. Yes, the cut budget, the absence of director Renat Davletyarov at the entrance, the audience on the star track, with its unrecognizable appearance more reminiscent of representatives of sponsors than movie stars...But that's not the point, after all. Moreover, the new rules for category “A” festivals, to which the MIFF belongs, according to old memory, have also somehow unexpectedly become democratized and now allow the inclusion of at least all the winners of Cannes and Berlin in the competition program, which program director Kirill Razlogov never tires of repeating. However, no one is going to openly give up: there is not a single winner of the “big festivals” in the MIFF competitions, there are participants in other - national, continental and other shows, but the quality of the submitted films has become, according to the selectors, much higher.
But they started saving from the first day - the opening ceremony was not just modest, but even somehow deliberately work-like.
Nikita Mikhalkov made a speech. Illustrating it with diagrams and diagrams of the growth of film production and graphs of the increase in the number of modern cinemas in the country. The numbers were impressive, showing how profits from the distribution of domestic blockbusters were growing, and the advertising of the TRITE studio's products, the receipts from which amounted to almost the entire amount, sounded quite clear.
The jury and the competition program were presented to the public. Then, to the accompaniment of Liszt's rhapsody, played by Denis Matsuev, they presented the prize for services to cinema to the Hungarian classic István Szabó... The classic remembered his youth and the Moscow festival forty years ago, when he was young, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Elem Klimov and many other masters were still alive. Yuri Luzhkov came out and again promised to build a festival center after all, and he and Nikita, as the mayor friendly called the MIFF president, clicked the firecracker. Moreover, a cultural official from the presidential administration read an address to the festival by the head of state: who writes them, it would be interesting to know? These official greetings sound so inhumanly clichéd and false. Alexander Sokolov, the current Minister of Culture, also appeared on stage.
After the rather fast-paced official part, the audience, which had thinned out considerably, was shown the first competition film, naturally on a production topic: about how films are made in Italy. It would, of course, be much more interesting to start the festival with the only Russian film in competition - “Premonition of Space” by Alexei Uchitel - but the director has still not recovered from the cold shower that critics gave him after “The Walk”, which opened the festival the year before last. In general, there was no other Russian film to open (or to close), the year, despite the graphs and diagrams, was not very fruitful, so we had to be content with the melodrama “The Desired Life” by Giuseppe Piccioni, a director known for his attention to the female soul and intimate experiences.
The film largely takes place on a film set, where the main characters star in a historical melodrama, playing out a story of passion, the echoes of which they begin to feel in their lives. The film contains many precise details and witty observations, but overall it skims the surface, plunging no more deeply into reality than everyday stories in glossy magazines. The film is pleasant in all respects, except for its size - it runs for more than two hours, and during this time the predictable twists and turns of the relationship between the acting couple, frankly, become rather boring.
Against the backdrop of beautiful faces and charming Italian landscapes, the northern half-darkness and snow cover of the Finnish film “Permafrost,” which began the second day of the festival, were clearly invigorating. Unfortunately, the story, which is told over the same two-plus hours by director Aku Louhimies, has one significant drawback - it is straightforward. The director boldly crosses the dangerous line of naturalism, demonstrating, as is customary today, all the pores on the faces of the characters, their farting and burping, in a truly documentary manner, capturing the hapless attempts to jump out of the confines of a wretched existence, their depressive loneliness and mental lethargy. At the very beginning, the humanities hero, telling students about Tolstoy, utters the key phrase that each hero of the Russian classic conveys to another the hell that he carries in his soul, and even draws a diagram on the board. A completely straightforward illustration of this thesis is the entire film, which, admittedly, is supported by the fact that after an hour and a half of viewing, the characters seem almost like family, and the world recreated on the screen, despite the gloomy hopelessness, seems alive and real. All these victims of other people's evil, reinforcing the impulses of aggression and hatred transmitted to them, in general, are somehow not to blame, and at the same time, not one of them makes an effort to break the vicious circle, each loses the fight for good in his soul . The conclusion is generally clear - you can’t argue with it, but for the sake of this, it’s somehow not necessary to experience so many unpleasant emotions with which the director torments us.
The Swedish debut “Guitar Mongoloid” is also close to reality and also presents a set of plot-wise episodes that are not too connected with each other, but which, however, form a coherent picture.
The harsh northern style must appeal to at least one member of the jury - the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, who shot the extremely frank and very unflattering film “Heat of a Dog”, which at one time received the Grand Prix of the Venice Film Festival. However, other members of the panel of judges - our Valentin Chernykh and Victoria Tolstoganova, as well as the Italian composer Nicola Piovani - may take the opposite position. But on the side of the new realism, the French director Claire Denis, who has experience in documentary filmmaking and trained with Wenders and Jarmusch, can come out on the side of the new realism, and the Hungarian cinematographer Janos Kende should appreciate the masterful long takes of the Finnish “Permafrost.”
However, now any forecasts are premature - in ten days only 17 films will be shown in the main competition, but no one doubts that the main events and joys await the public outside the competition. And although most of the films in the panorama have already been purchased for distribution, the inertia of preference for already well-known and promoted names is still stronger than the hope for one’s own discoveries.
And this is the problem with the festival, which still has not learned how to truly create events, present participants, or invent new brands on its own.