Translated material
FILM INSTEAD OF BANDAGE
KINOBODKA
The New British Film Festival has ended in Moscow. Starting in St. Petersburg, passing the baton to Moscow, the forum continues its march across Russia. Next on the route - Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, ...
The New British Film Festival has ended in Moscow. Starting in St. Petersburg, passing the baton to Moscow, the forum continues its march across Russia. Next on the route - Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk ...
The festival originated in the second half of the 1990s, when British cinema was on the rise. In comparison with the amazing collages of programs of the past years (the shocking split-screen experiments of Michael Figgis, the politically incorrect intrigues of Guy Ricci, refuting the idea of puritanical England of Nigel Cole's melodramas), the current review left the impression of a verified, more precisely, moderate ... more precisely, an average movie.
Consistent troublemakers in the cinema world have chosen preaching as the main genre of cinema. The main theme of the festival is the coexistence of the worlds - Christian and Islamic.
The “Farewell Kiss” by the classic and exemplary socialist Ken Loach is an almost patriarchal love story, a variation on the theme of “Romeo and Juliet” (Cesar Award for the best film of the countries of the European Union). Roisin is a music teacher at an Irish Catholic college, and Pakistani Qasim is a DJ. We can say modern Europeans. But two worlds, two parallel universes are ready to go wall to wall, just to separate the lovers. The Catholic Padre drives the teacher out of the school, the Pakistani community is preparing an insidious plot: to tear the dissolute heterodox from the pious boy! Loach deliberately didn't tell the actors how the story would end. From this, fear guards hope in their eyes: the inviolability of the foundations and ideas that have entangled modern society is too demonstrative, monumental. Loach observes the difficult and unpredictable life of closed diasporas in the center of the once prosperous Old World, now corroded by the rust of phobias and fear.
He fails to avoid moralizing. However, Loach was never afraid of edification. He has long regarded cinema as a department. Year after year, film after film, they say the obvious: "All people are equally important." Why isn't he heard? His cinema is a way of public controversy. Of all the angry people who came out of the BBC in the 1960s, Loach was the most committed to using film as a medium of protest. “Only truth will give freedom, both stylistic and moral,” the socialist romantic is still convinced.
The "incorrigible idealist" is echoed by young directors. The most scandalous tape of the program was the "Hamburg suicide bomber". Antonia Byrd reconstructs the events leading up to the September terrorist attack. But the dramatic helplessness and neutrality of the author's intonation, trying, if not to justify the Lebanese student who flew the Boeing, then to understand him, are shocking. Therefore, the author of the "Hamburg suicide bomber" was accused of sympathy for terrorists.
"Yasmin" by Kenneth Glenaan continues the discussion that Loach unfolded on the screen. How can the West and the East coexist on the same street, in the same office, in the same family, in the same destiny? The girl Yasmin turned into a two-faced Janus, living a double life. Leaving the Pakistani ghetto in London in her own car, she pulls off her hijab and scarves, fits into tight jeans. Lipstick, trendy glasses... Who recognizes a devout Muslim woman in an emancipated Englishwoman working in a social service, flirting in bars, puffing on a cigarette... September 11 will change everything. Not only the buildings of the shopping center will collapse, the life of modern society will crack at the seams, and in an instant their own will turn into strangers.
The sixth British Film Festival did not give a single genuine discovery, but confirmed the desire of English filmmakers to develop as opposed to Hollywood - within the framework of non-format cinema, sharply social, not flirting with the audience. Island cinema always accurately and impartially diagnoses the state of modern society. And this time the diagnosis is clearly disappointing: paranoid schizophrenia, aggravated by moral degradation.
In "Trial by Love" by Roger Mitchell, love itself is the least of all, although the characters constantly talk about it. The failed attempt at a psychological thriller falls apart into three dramatic patches stitched together by one hero. Remorse of conscience (indirect guilt for the death of a person), persecution of a loving maniac, overcoming one's own egoism ... All this is told confusedly and inconsistently, like a monologue of a mentally ill person at a psychoanalyst's appointment.
Urgent help from a psychiatrist is also needed by the heroine of "Delusion" (directed by Juliette McCohen) Cathy. With schizophrenic perseverance, she tries to find her dead sister, for this she is ready to step even inside blurred video frames, even into the afterlife ... The film as a “delusion” or “tracking camera” aimed inside consciousness is a bait for fans of astral travel, those who like to follow the direction third eye. For even more thrill-seekers, Trauma by Mark Evans is a detailed reconstruction of paranoia. Exquisitely selected reality (a former hospital building, unlit roads, a colorful crowd of shopping streets). Where is the murder of a pop diva, a car accident, love dates - in reality - or are these post-traumatic hallucinations of the hero?
Among all this "traumatic film obsession", Matthew Vaughn's directorial debut "Layer Pie" stands apart. The film adaptation of the gangster novel by Jay Connolly is made according to the patterns of Guy Ricci's black humor. By the way, it was Matthew Vaughn (in his spare time from directing - the husband of Claudia Schiffer) who produced Ricci's films. The criminal adventures of drug dealers of the middle hand are twisted into a funnel of "kindred" interests of inveterate criminals, the police, Serbian war criminals, and drug lords. The storylines are rolled out in neat layers, forming layers of exciting intrigue of a gangster movie, as boring as it is, just as always desired by the public. Vaughn obviously succeeded in his “pie”: moderately baked, flavored with typical English humor, peppered with bloody cynical showdowns in the spirit of Ricci. But the main filling of the "pie" was the work of Daniel Craig in the title role - a discreet, well-mannered drug broker who decided to start illegal business. This role can be considered a dress rehearsal of the world-famous English actor for the next chapter of Bond. It is already known that the next agent 007 will be a true gentleman Daniel Craig.
The gangster film of the prosperous aristocrat Matthew Vaughn only at first glance is far from the traditions of the "poetry of kitchen sinks" of English cinema. It does not at all run counter to the general panorama of the modern world, which has fallen into a state of post-traumatic shock. The descendants of the "angry young" Anglo-Sixties continue to brush off the gloss from the screen, subjecting the life of modern society to a scrupulous impartial analysis. And the reality is more and more reminiscent of the "chronicle of the announced death." In the bewitchingly large, almost television optics of the "island cinema" - the writhing of a world stricken with madness. As modern film classic Leo Carax noted: “We are already getting used to living in a state of hopelessness. And soon an even more brutal period will come ... Cinema should accompany people in danger. Provided that it is itself directed towards danger.