The chaste story of Valentin Rasputin turned into an erotic thriller

Festival/cinema

The 19th Russian film festival "Kinotavr" opened with a film adaptation of Valentin Rasputin's story "Live and Remember", filmed by Alexander Proshkin. The main director's task in this film turned out to be the maximum disclosure of the eroticism inherent in the original source, the true scale of which LIDIA MASLOVA had no idea about.

By bringing to the screen the chaste work of the classic of rural literature, Alexander Proshkin took full advantage of the current freedom of morals and showed everything that Valentin Rasputin bashfully kept silent about without undue shyness. Because of this, the love story between the Siberian village Nastena (Daria Moroz, who trained to play this role in the Moscow Art Theater production) and her husband (Mikhail Evlanov), who deserted from the Great Patriotic War, whom she hides in the bathhouse, sparkled with new, brutal colors. It’s one thing when on Rasputin’s paper the husband who unexpectedly comes to the heroine materializes in the form of an obscure dark figure warning: “Be quiet, Nastena, it’s me,” and quite another thing when on the screen this energetic phrase is accompanied by an equally energetic performance of marital duty, which, under dramatic circumstances, from a routine activity that for four years did not bear any fruit for the heroes in the sense of procreation, turns into an exciting adventure and results in a pregnancy that is not so much desirable as inevitable.

Responding at a press conference to a reproach for the increased physiological nature of his film, Alexander Proshkin explained the somewhat animalistic habits with which his characters take possession of each other by saying that “this is simply the physiological truth of the lives of these people - they love each other rudely, harshly, openly and briefly,” and there is no need to impose on them cinematic ideas about beautiful romantic love. However, oddly enough, the laudable desire to avoid melodramatic cliches, all sorts of languid sighs and clouded glances and to present Rasputin’s story as harshly as possible does not give a convincing artistic result, despite the efforts to extremely simplify and peasantize the performers.

So, since it takes place in a Siberian village, on the Angara, a special tutor worked with the actors, teaching them the local dialect: the dialect, as Alexander Proshkin said, is not entirely authentic, but “average”, because the authentic, terry Angara dialect is a resident of the middle zone in general I wouldn't understand. But the imitation of this compromise, average speech takes away quite a lot of energy from the actors, who are trying not to lose their colorful “eyes,” which, it must be said, does not add much to the truth of life, but rather produces a comic effect. In the intervals between the “okana”, the actors compete with each other to see who can more convincingly portray the sad stupor. Mikhail Evlanov in a disheveled wig and Daria Moroz, whose tangled hair apparently symbolizes the intricacy of the life collision that befell the heroine, are on par in terms of the tragedy of their faces, but when Sergei Makovetsky appears in the role of Nastena Mikheich’s father, he easily removes his young colleagues with the help of one only three days of stubble. For those who are able to doubt Sergei Makovetsky’s ability to resemble a peasant simply by virtue of his very natural appearance, the actor told the story that during filming in the village he blended in with the local residents so much that the director could not find him on the set.

It would, of course, be one-sided to perceive “Live and Remember” simply as an emotionally charged story about how a husband and wife lived a routine sex life solely because it was supposed to be so, and in an extreme situation they remembered that there could be sex reasons other than established custom and habit. Proshkin's film, like any work of art on a rural theme, is loaded with a super-idea about “returning to the roots” and, in addition, according to the director, contains “a certain amount of feminism.” Feminism is manifested in the idea that life in the village is glimmering only thanks to women whose instinct for procreation has not yet atrophied (except for Daria Moroz, this age-old eternal femininity in felt boots and a sheepskin coat is embodied in the film by Anna Mikhalkova in the role of the heroine’s temperamental neighbor), while the male function is, on the contrary, to ruin and destroy everything.

In general, everything in this film is for a reason, everything symbolizes something and pushes towards sociological generalizations: for example, the ice drift is not just a natural phenomenon and a picturesque spectacle, but a symbol of the indomitable attraction of the heroes to each other, which is useless to resist, and the death of the sufferer Nastena is in no way less than a metaphor for the death of the Russian village, the visibility of which is aggravated by images of burned churches. It’s just a pity that behind this entire well-developed and well-functioning system of metaphorical images, the only element somehow lost and overlooked was precisely the psychological content, which allows you to read Rasputin’s story to the end without dislocating your jaw from yawning.

For the sake of life in the village