Translated material
Walk like that
“One Love in a Million” on Moscow screens
There is grass in the yard, there is a little over ninety years on the grass. The former head of the youth St. Petersburg yacht club, and now the middle river businessman Stepanych (Alexander Berda), has problems: in order to complete a deal with visiting abreks, he at all costs needs to find a scapegoat in one day - the chairman of the fake company, who would accepted a million counterfeit dollars from guests from the south, and then would have been eliminated without much remorse. Desperate to find a suitable candidate among the patients of a psychiatric clinic, Stepanych accidentally stumbles upon his former ward Mitya (Ruslan Kurik), an idealistic music lover who, without much success, brings art to the masses, selling home-made cassettes with recordings of King Crimson, David Bowie and Astor Piazzola at a flea market. . As an additional entourage, prostitute Anya (Lina Mirimskaya) is assigned to Mityai’s front office as a secretary. Of course, at the moment of transferring a million, everything goes awry, shots and explosions thunder, and young people who have just met find themselves in a car with a treasured suitcase in the back seat, rushing straight to Moscow. To the capital of our Motherland, where Anya’s friend, eccentric party girl Rita (Elena Morozova), lives in a Stalinist high-rise building together with her next boyfriend Kotik (Dmitry Maryanov). After jointly lighting a couple of cigarettes with criminal contents, the company comes up with a brilliant idea to save money for Aron Melkumov (Vladimir Simonov) - a singer-statist, a constant participant in concerts for Police Day, and part-time - an influential business man closely associated with criminal circles...At this point (or even much earlier), even the least savvy individual in world cinema will certainly begin to experience a feeling of the notorious déjà vu. Of course, we have already seen all this before Vladimir Shchegolkov’s film. Specifically, in the magnificent film by Tony Scott, based on the screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, “True Romance,” which has not yet lost its enthusiasm. They tried to imitate this film, as well as Tarantino’s cinema in general, before (quite clear allusions were evoked, say, by Shchegolkov’s debut film “Happy Birthday, Lola!”), but never before have the main twists and turns and entire scenes been reproduced with such disarming meticulousness. Everything is in its place, and it doesn’t matter at all that comic books here replaced audio cassettes, cocaine turned into counterfeit bills, a Hollywood film producer gave way to a pop mogul, and there were no cinemas showing three films about kung fu in a row in both capitals. no and most likely not expected. But there is a lovingly reconstructed - and no less bloody - scene of the fight between Alabama (read - Ani) and a sadistic gangster (during which you constantly nervously move your eyes around the screen in search of a textbook tailspin), and the functions of Denis Hopper’s character are quite adequate distributed between Stepanych and Mityaev by their neighbor in the communal apartment, a drunken retired officer Surovtsev (Andrey Krasko). And Dmitry Maryanov, despite the difference in weight categories, looks like a glove in the place of Brad Pitt’s always stoned character. At times, the similarity teeters on the dangerous edge of copyright infringement, but one does not dare to accuse the filmmakers of plagiarism - everything here is, in essence, meaningful and to the point.
All this, however, would have been nothing more than an amusing cinephile attraction if among the main characters there had not been one more, namely the actual time of action, the beginning of the 90s. A time that entered mythology much sooner than one might have expected, that is, almost immediately after it ended. A time when cell phones had not yet become a common item, and the telephone booth was an integral part of the urban landscape; when the trick of opening a beer bottle with your eye could still impress your flea market companion; when the price of a human life and a vinyl record brought from Amsterdam was estimated at the same amount - approximately from five hundred to a thousand “greens”. A time to which the definition given by Aron Melkumov of the already mentioned King Crimson, in whose music the performer of patriotic songs rightly saw the “hidden power of chaos,” fits perfectly. For completely objective reasons, the first and most obvious of which is the youth of most of the film crew (the statement of the artist Mirimskaya in one of the interviews is typical in this regard: “I was little. Everyone around shouted “perestroika,” I didn’t know what it was. Well some kind of infernal-emotional time"), the local zeitgeist seems somewhat constructed, but if so, this everyday “Lego” was assembled with considerable diligence and care. This is especially true for the soundtrack. Here you have - in the flesh - the group "Technology" (at one time reminiscent of Depeche Mode even more strongly than "One Love in a Million" - Scott's film) and the immortal "I'll Die Young" from Mr. Small, and the cooperative clever- the clever “Combinations”, and the still quite earthly Zhanna Aguzarova, and “Center” with things from the unknown like the classic program “Made in Paris” released at that time by the Melodiya company, and on the other side of the imaginary record - David Bowie, Robert Smith, Brian Eno. And everything grows together.
In essence, it could not help but grow together. The beginning of the 90s was that unique period when the post-Soviet space, for many reasons, became absolutely cinematic, if we mean primarily overseas gangster cinema. And what young people, to varying degrees, had the opportunity to see in underground video salons and in the apartments of other people’s friends, quite significantly rudely, visibly winked and spread their fingers in reality - they just had to step outside the threshold. Moreover, this similarity turned out to be not only social, but also of a completely aesthetic nature. Therefore, neither the place nor the circumstances of the action are of particular importance in this case - the “open road” (this is what Tarantino’s script for True Love was originally called) runs far in any case. And there will be plenty of fun ahead. As Vasily Shumov sang in the composition crowning the picture, which, like no other in Russian rock, asks for the final credits (and the fact that the creators of “One Love in a Million” finally put it in its rightful place deserves special applause), “everything is ours.” - forever". And not ours either.