Music Morricone, words Rappoport

Giuseppe Tornator (photo by N. Chetverikova)

At the XXIX MMKF showed the last film of the competition - “Stranger” by Giuseppe Tornator

Last year, at the Moscow International Film Festival, filmmakers and Kilumluba had high hopes for Bertrand Blier's painting "How much you are standing." These hopes did not materialize, but the film pleased ordinary mortal spectators and the editorial office of the Russian Vogue, which awarded him a prize for the best style decision. It is understandable: the film of the famous director in fact turned out to be a set of beautiful photographs of Monica Bellucci in multi -colored silk combinations.

This year, another famous discoverer of Monica Bellucci, an Oscar -winning Italian Giuseppe Tornator, presented at the festival the painting “Stranger”, in fact turned out to be a set of sketches of southern beauties and naked nature with a slight social slope.

We were waiting for this picture not only because in her homeland it received 4 David Donello prizes, not only because Annio Morricone wrote the music for it, whose melodies sound in every second crossing of the Moscow metro, but also because the main role in it was played by the actress of the theater Leo Dodina Ksenia Rappoport. The long expectation of the most high -profile film in the current competition program was crowned with today's show as a cherry cake: tasty, cute and completely no calories. The tornator took off the glamorous burlesk on the topic of Ukrainian prostitution and the trading of children with the same grace with which Paul Veruven invaded the horrors of the Holocaust in his Black Book.

Ksenia Rappoport (photo by N. Chetverikova)

A former prostitute from Ukraine named Irina Yaroshenko lives in Italy. She hides a large amount of money in flower pots, is afraid of her former Italian pimp, rubs into confidence in the jewelers' family and becomes a nanny with their little daughter. She is haunted by flash beams about a past life, fear for the girl, whom she considers her daughter, unreasonable (literally) pimp and violent fantasy of the director, known for love for melodramatic and dashing plots.

The film unfolds simultaneously in three dimensions: we see the frames of the brothel past the heroine, observe a sudden beginning, a happy flow and unexpected end of her novel with an Italian worker, and we follow her attempts to establish life next to the alleged daughter in the present. None of these layers wears a trace of real life. The sadistic porn sancture was shot in deliberately Gauguin flowers, with grotesque visual details: puppet masks, thick ropes on the naked bodies of prostitutes, lace linen, scarlet stilettos and tanned pot in the role of the main villain. The idyllic happiness of the heroine with a loved one is shown in blurry, almost drawn shots, reminiscent of the sun -filled pictures of impressionists. The modernity is represented by gloomy gray colors and a lullaby in Ukrainian, which Ksenia Rappoport wrote to the music of Morricon with the help of her friends - “St. Petersburg crests”.

In this riot and contrast of juicy, almost picturesque colors, any story seems glamorous and stylish - even such, in general, unsightly as the story of a “stranger”. The Ukrainian prostitute, for 12 years, spent in slavery to the Italian pimp, who gave birth to 9 children sold to unknown people, who lost his beloved, who was killed by a pimp, under the brush of a tornator, turns into Ksenia Rappoport - a beautiful, bright, strong woman on which any clothing looks like a designed outfit.

In the picture, its past - social terms is quite terrible - life looks happy and sunny, especially in comparison with the eternal cloudiness and grayness of current existence. Yes, and the film itself, especially in comparison with other paintings on a similar topic-for example, with Ulrich’s “Import Export” about a Ukrainian girl who first works in a porn salon, and then leaves to look for happiness in Austria-looks like a cloudless glamor. The Ukrainian origin of the heroine, like the whole “socialite”, does not have any meaning here: it, like a rusty bucket in the photo in a glossy magazine, is only a stylish detail, no more.

Actually, the film does not need nothing in Ukrainian, except for the lullaby written by friends of Ksenia Rappoport. At a press conference, a tornator admitted that he chose Ukraine almost by accident-simply because this country often appears in newspaper reports where it comes to crime and prostitution. In a film that looks like a glossy photo shoot on the topic of prostitution and acquisition of self -esteem, the country of origin of the model has absolutely no meaning.

But everything that matters is the color, the composition of the frame, sweet and alarming music, which gives rise to the memories of the smell of popcorn from the neighboring rows and timid sobs in the darkness of the cinema, - was made impeccably. Everything is beautiful, everyone is sorry, a little girl is a perfect angel, and Ksenia Rappoport speaks perfectly in Italian. The tornator turned out to be a beautiful Hollywood melodrama, with Hollywood, an unexpectedly good end. A very positive widely boiled movie: it seems to you to be told about prostitution and children's trafficking, about prison and murders, and you only cry and are touched.