Translated material
Scary dream
“Canned Food” on Moscow screens
At the very end, Marat Basharov wakes up with a wild cry, in a cold sweat. The viewer will have to watch the dream that plunged him into horror over the previous two hours - called “Canned Food” (director - Yegor Konchalovsky, genre - action movie, total budget - $ 5.5 million). To reveal in an article a plot device that is designed to turn everything upside down is desperate meanness, and in relation to “The Sixth Sense,” for example, or “The Others,” few people have stooped to this. But, having shared the difficult fate of watching a dream with Basharov’s hero, I want to immediately repay the authors with something. Unfortunately, upon common reflection, you realize that you are rather providing a service: now the viewer knows that the author knows that this is nonsense, which means that the author is not so hopeless. Although the question remains: if you understand that you are demonstrating terrible nonsense, why offer to buy tickets for it? It is not difficult, however, to guess that regarding the artistic quality of “dilirium” both Konchalovsky and the producers financing his next film (they change all the time, but for some reason they are there every time) have a different opinion.The director himself says the following about the appearance of the “Canned Food” project: “Once a producer came up to me (I haven’t seen him since then) and said: let’s do an action movie with you!” “What action?” - Konchalovsky is interested. “But it doesn’t matter which one!” Believing in the seriousness of producer N’s intentions, Yegor Andreevich goes to his screenwriter and says: “Let’s write an action movie!” "Which?" - he asks. “But it doesn’t matter which one!” The screenwriter rushes to fulfill the order and creates something under the working title “Escape with a Pig.” But then other producers appear (the first one, as we remember, disappeared). These new ones even have names: Ruben Dishdishyan and his company CentralPartnership. But they offer Konchalovsky not “Escape with a Pig”, but simply “Escape” - a script that was brought to the studio by Yevgeny Mironov (and geniuses sometimes have stains on their conscience). The result is known: a devastating press and a failure at the box office, from which even the leading actor, the favorite of millions, who had recently played The Idiot from the Russian classic, could not save him.
But here again other producers appear, and this time - Nadezhda Solovyova herself, the head of the SAV Entertaiment company, the iron lady of Russian show business, who has regularly brought world-class pop stars to Russia over the past twenty years. But show business, as she admitted at a press conference, was already boring - she wanted something new, for example a movie; I have known Yegor Konchalovsky for a long time, and his idea (which is “with a pig”) touched and excited me. The general producer of the BFG-Media company, member of the board of directors of the BFG-Credit bank, Yuri Glotser, has undertaken to share with Ms. Solovyova the financial burden of the new project of the director with a famous surname. It is not for us to judge how significant the five and a half million dollars spent on the film (production plus advertising) are for the BFG structures. Now - about the plan that seduced respectable people. (Of course, after “Escape,” the title “Escape with a Pig” had to be changed, but that’s not the point.)
A journalist specializing in hot spots (Basharov) receives an audio recording of a conversation between two high-ranking government officials about supplying raw materials for nuclear weapons to a country that should not have nuclear weapons. On the advice of his loving wife (Lyubov Tolkalina), he goes to his supposed friend, General Astrakhantsev (Alexander Galibin) for advice on what to do with the recording. The general throws the disc into the fireplace, recommending that they forget about it forever, but it turns out that a double is hidden in a safe place. Then a previously caught aunt is thrown from the bridge under the wheels of the journalist’s car (she flies down screaming “You are animals, gentlemen!”), drugs are planted in the car, and as a result - a court, mines, a maximum security colony. In the camp, prisoners trained by enemies beat the hero mercilessly, but he, regularly, with the intonations of Pyotr Mamonov, reading the prayer of the Optina elders, only gets stronger, and refuses to give up the recording. Among the hordes of enemies in the zone, there are also friends: the Caucasian war veteran Usoltsev (Alexei Serebryakov), framed by the same Astrakhantsev, and thief in law Thomas (Sergei Shakurov). Having joined forces, they run, kill their pursuers, fly into an abyss, fall into an underground reservoir, swim in the pool at a nightclub like “Ibiza” (remember, this takes place on the Kola Peninsula) - a psychedelic paradise where they are treated to mushrooms - - they leave paradise, go to Moscow, and all this takes quite a lot of time. It is precisely this time that Astrakhantsev does not waste in vain: he seduces the hero’s wife, with whom, it turns out, he has been in love for a long time, she shoots herself in repentance, then cuts her wrists; Astrakhantsev’s people are trying to kidnap her child, but then the journalist and the veteran return (the thief fell behind on the way) and quickly restore order in the hero’s apartment, scattering the corpses of uninvited guests in the corners. In fairness, we must admit that the FSB general (Andrei Smolyakov) and his limited contingent of honest security officers help them in this. But the head of the villains - Astrakhantsev - is not neutralized! It is this fact, and not a pile of monstrous nonsense, that makes the hero scream wildly in the finale.
In fact, as Konchalovsky himself admits, he came up with the dream trick, finished filming it and pasted it in at the very end, and before that he did everything seriously. But, it seems, the results of the work impressed even him - since an urgent disguise was required under “it’s all make-believe.”
In contrast to the average glossy picture of “The Recluse” (Konchalovsky’s debut in big cinema almost ten years ago) and “Escape” in “Canned Food”, as in both “Antikillers”, there is a special kind of gloss - with a yellow tint. “Antikillers” betrayed the author’s close acquaintance not only with Far Eastern militants, but in general with all the trash produced in that part of the globe. True, people who are more knowledgeable than I claim that these are the aesthetic preferences not of Konchalovsky himself, but of his then producer Yusup Bakshiev. Since Antikillers is the director's only commercially successful project, the oriental coloring appears again. But only in “Canned Food” is this imitation no longer of the original, but of a copy—of itself, a model of the early 2000s, and this makes the spectacle completely unbearable.
“But this is a comic book!” - people representing the interests of the authors will probably tell you. Don't believe it. What, you haven’t seen real comics? Thank God, even since the days of Antikillers, our distribution of foreign hits has gone far ahead. These are canned goods - as was said. A hopelessly expired strategic reserve of a generation that until recently was considered “young.”
By the will of circumstances, the day after “Canned Food,” the press was shown a film by the director of the next new generation - “Dead Daughters” by Pavel Ruminov (released from February 1), and these two films formed an extremely harmonious and edifying duet. Stylization for art (the case of Ruminov) turned out to be as helpless as stylization for trash (the case of Konchalovsky) - and again proved that there is no such formal technique that would allow one to hide for a long time an offensive, but very common circumstance - the banal inability to make films.