Translated material
Shiny
A new film by Andrei Konchalovsky is coming out on Moscow screens
“Gloss” is a film where famous and not so famous characters act under fictitious names, where satire alternates with melodrama, and director Andrei Konchalovsky expresses everything he thinks about those who wear Prada and the advent of the era of glamor in Russia.Konchalovsky himself believes that “Gloss” continues the theme begun by “The Pockmarked Hen.” It showed how capitalism comes to a post-Soviet village, here on the screen is what this capitalism has resulted in.
Chicken Ryaba” was filmed at a time when the main Western glossy brands in Russia could only be seen in Duty Free kiosks at international airports, and the only domestic gloss, “Domovaya”, replaced all “Vogie” and “Eli”. Elle, however, like Cosmo, was already on the way, a little later the Russian Playboy appeared, which was then “ruled” by music critic Artemy Troitsky with the help of literary critic Lev Danilkin, and at the height of the crisis of 1998 (that is, exactly at the end of August) on domestic counters under the slogan “Vogue in Russia at last!” the main brand of world glamor appeared. About this “at the end” (what, one might ask?) they made all sorts of jokes - and, as it turned out, in vain. Russian gloss survived the crisis surprisingly easily, growing with new titles every year, domestic models began to appear on the covers, and stories about how Russian beauties conquered Western catwalks became textbooks.
Those girls who had not yet made it to the podium and covers, in the hope of correcting this misunderstanding, quickly sent their photographs to Playboy or Komsomolskaya Pravda.
It was with the photograph printed on the last page of KP that the story of the heroine of Andrei Konchalovsky’s new film began - seamstress Galya Sokolova “from Rostov-on-Don,” who suffered, loved, but still got married because she managed to overcome her pride in time . One of Sokolova’s legs was shorter than the other, but both were beautiful (the heroine is played by Yulia Vysotskaya), and the difference in length in the photograph of a half-naked Galina, which a local photographer sent to Komsomolskaya Pravda, was not at all noticeable.
With this photo as a portfolio and a basket of Don gifts, Galya set off to storm the capital’s publication. According to the script written by Konchalovsky himself together with Dunya Smirnova, no stranger to glossy editorials, it was, naturally, Vogue; in the film, subject to the laws of product placement, Beauty appeared instead. Irina Rozanova, who once wonderfully played Arkadina in Konchalovsky’s play “The Seagull,” starred in the role of the editor-in-chief, Olga Arntgolts played the role of her daughter, and Nikolai Noskov portrayed their common lover, a fashion photographer.
This whole company at first unanimously resists the invasion of the provincial Gali, but soon completely forgets about her, immersed in sorting out their own difficult relationships, and then the authors immediately forget about the people of “Beauty” so that they won’t even remember about them until the end of the film.
The looseness of dramatic constructions is one of the amazing (keeping in mind the professionalism of the people who wrote the script) features of this work. The other is a grumpily edifying tone, which even in those who treat gloss with the highest degree of irony, makes them want to immediately come to its defense. And ask the director if he really thinks that the editor-in-chief of a major magazine may not be aware of what the current trend is in the art galleries of London and Paris (in the film, the editor-in-chief is explained by his twenty-year-old daughter, and the forty-year-old mother bats her eyes as if she were even the editor not Beauty, but “Peasant Women” from Soviet times). Or should a fashion photographer really look and act the same as the housekeeper from the TV series “Who’s the Boss?” Or why the director is sure that girls nowadays walk around modeling agencies exclusively naked...
In general, there are quite a lot of questions, and the expected answer: “Because Russian gloss is infinitely provincial,” can only be considered a partial answer. Russian gloss, if by gloss we mean magazines about fashion and lifestyle, it is not much different from Greek, Spanish, German, Polish, etc. Another thing is that in the newsstands of New York or even Berlin, the abundance of glossy brands looks completely natural, not in Moscow. The ratio of glitter and poverty in Russian life is so clearly shifted towards poverty that the glitter seems comically out of place here.
According to Konchalovsky, both sides of Russian reality - both the glossy and the faded - are equally kitsch. The characters in his film also became kitsch: the popular fashion designer played by Efim Shifrin, and the Rostov girlfriend Galya, who reads Sorokin and talks about postmodernism, and Galya herself, and her crazy mother, and the alcoholic father, and so kitsch that they have already turned from people into function, just as it happens with the heroes of glamor publications.
Regardless of his intentions, Konchalovsky made an absolutely glossy film, so that one recalls the famous dialogue from Dovlatov’s notebooks - “it’s somehow too Soviet... well, anti-Soviet, what’s the difference.”
As for Galya... After sitting at a sewing machine in the workshops of the hero Shifrin, washing the floors and working as a “HR manager” for Pyotr Listerman (the owner of an elite escort services agency - the only one who is named in the film by his real name), heeding the advice of “ specialist about fashion”, excellently performed by Alexei Serebryakov, she marries an oligarch because he has a villa in Monaco and he is looking for a wife who looks like Grace Kelly, and the wife of Andrei Sergeevich Konchalovsky, as you know, is slightly similar to Grace Kelly.
The oligarch is played by Alexander Domogarov, which, as I strongly suspect, will completely deprive female viewers (and whether the film will have male viewers is another question) of the opportunity, following the authors, to consider the heroine a very unhappy girl and shed a tear over her bitter fate.