Translated material
Reboot
New cinema of Eastern Europe at the Moscow International Film Festival
The Moscow Film Festival ended successfully without showing the public any radical changes. If the programs themselves have somehow settled down, the viewer has managed to get used to “Eight and a Half”, and to “Asian Extreme”, and to “Around the World”, then the main question continues to hang in the air: how does the MIFF differ from other festivals of the so-called “ A" category. Three years ago, the Cannes Forum also experienced a crisis, but somehow got out of it by focusing on glamor, respectability and mass audiences. The complaints about the Moscow festival do not change from year to year. Critics are traditionally perplexed about the selection of the competition program and grumble in unison that the best films out of competition have already been purchased for distribution without any MIFF. Distributors routinely note that the MIFF is indecently far from the film business and does not in any way influence the distribution fate of the films shown.The most unexpected recommendations are coming in for rebranding the Moscow Festival. For example, the chairman of the current grand jury, Andrzej Zulawski, advised the organizers to move the MIFF from summer to winter, to focus on Russian troika and black caviar, to stop including scraps from the Cannes and Venice tables in the competition program, and to focus on Central Asian and Eastern European cinema. As for the delights of the Russian winter, the residents of Moscow seem dubious, but regarding the last point, it seems that the selectors should seriously think about it. Films by directors of the former Eastern bloc appeared in the MIFF program almost more often than at the Karlovy Vary forum, which opened on Friday, traditionally focused on Eastern European cinema.
One of the most unexpected films of the festival was “Taxidermy” by the Magyar prodigy György Palffy, which from now on will only be seen on DVD, and this is not a fact, since our distributors are reluctant to buy films that do not fit into the television format. Palfi's film is unformatted in all respects: both because it was made at the rigid intersection of cinema and performative aesthetics, and because vomit literally splashes out from the screen onto the viewer, and this chaos is completed by the scene of the separation of the head from the body, filmed according to all the rules of anatomical theater. It is characteristic that through such visual pranks, a graduate of the Budapest film school reflects on the topic of the recent Soviet history of his country. It would be logical to suggest this kind of conceptual experiments here, in Sorokin’s homeland, but, alas, our young directors, even in their most radical works, do not dare to dismember the body of traditional cinema. Either culture does not allow, or tradition presses. By the way, Palfi’s previous film “Hiccups,” a plot and visual experiment on the theme of ritual murders of males in a godforsaken Hungarian village, is available on DVD.
As for the cinematic tradition, it has reached us in its most preserved form in the works of young Polish directors. The painting “Ode to Joy,” included in the “Eight and a Half” program, is the fruit of the collective work of three authors: Anna Kazejak-David, Jan Komas and Maciej Migas. This important detail is revealed only when reading the catalogue: despite the fact that the creators divided Poland into geographical regions and filmed three socially oriented short stories (“Silesia”, “Warsaw” and “Pomerania”), the same visual style is discernible in each of them - as if modern Scandinavian cinema was crossed with the recognizable screenwriting school of Krzysztof Zanussi. By the way, unrefined close-ups and a nervously shaking camera - traces of the belated influence of "dogma" - are ideally suited to Polish plots, where leftist ideology is bizarrely combined with Catholic morality.
Another Polish film, “This is Me,” by a recent graduate of the Lodz film school, Anna Jadowska, echoes the plot of the work of the young Czech Juliusz Szewczyk Restart. One film critic wittily noted that when in modern Western cinema a woman rushes around the screen in search of something unknown, such a plot is perceived only in the context of “getting crazy,” while Eastern European directors still interpret it as an “existential crisis.” The Polish young lady, through a simple “road movie,” managed to convey an unmotivated desire to escape from life, where everything had settled down, worked out and taken place, and this makes you want to howl like a wolf. The plot of the series is “we would like your problems,” but the inhabitants of the post-Soviet space are experiencing such a state for the first time, here they waited a long time for bourgeois satiety and regularity, and when they received it, they immediately cursed this dubious paradise.
The film by Czech debutant Sevcik Restart, shot in the recognizable manner of Pumpkin’s “Lola,” differently diagnoses the causes of modern female hysteria. Here the heroine jokingly expresses wishful thinking, and when her words are unexpectedly taken seriously, she spends a lot of effort to neutralize the result. The film is stylized to match the aesthetics of MTV, the author actively uses computer game techniques, but the essence does not change: the heroine also does not know what to do with herself in the face of open opportunities, and prefers an infantile situation when everything is predetermined.
In general, paintings by our Eastern European neighbors enjoyed unexpected audience demand at the festival. Both Palfi's visual experiments and the social concerns of the Poles were adequately received by our conservative public, and the three-hour film by the Romanian absurdist Cristi Pui (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) completely sold out. By the way, the films of our Eastern European colleagues were strikingly different from the works of our debutants not in any special skill, but in their ability to tell a recognizable life story. For example, in the film “It’s Me,” a boy is looking for a girl all the way and can’t meet her, almost like in our “Peter FM”, with the only difference that in the Polish film you believe every word and gesture, but in ours you get the output is only a glossy surrogate of reality.
But the most offensive thing in this story is that no one will look at these pictures anymore. No matter how much they talk about the shortage of youth films, it is impossible to press restart, since distributors will not accept these films for either wide or limited release. And here you will inevitably remember the ironic advice of Mr. Zulawski. Rather than giving a prize for directing to the already well-deserved and well-deserved Blie, wouldn’t it be better to open the world to Magyar prodigies and Polish extremists.