Looking for something. The bar for Kinotavr was set by films by venerable directors based on books by modern classics: “Live and Remember” by Alexander Proshkin based on Valentin Rasputin and “The Captive” by Alexei Uchitel based on Vladimir Makanin. However, the know-how of this festival is the predominance in the competition of young
Debutants (that is, according to the European classification, the authors of the first or second full-length films) are doing the same thing they always do: they are intensely searching. The main problem is not even that everyone is looking for something of their own, but that few people have an idea of what exactly they would like to find.
Love like it was said
There is only one point of certainty: everyone wants love - for starters, the audience, although the recognition of colleagues, festivals and critics would also not hurt. So they are trying to infect the public with this noble feeling. Take, for example, "The Four Ages of Love" - the director's experience of cameraman Sergei Mokritsky, divided into four short stories and four seasons. Each of the plots, oversaturated with details of touchingly recognizable reality (there are old people from Sokolniki Park, and Chechen militants, and abandoned pioneer camps, and notary offices, and even cemeteries; Igor Irtenyev and Andrei Bilzho also act as picturesque artifacts) is nothing else like a biblical story. No matter how much the viewer adores Igor Yasulovich and Leah Akhedzhakova, will the story of Abraham and Sarah, told in the scenery of a Moscow trolley bus, convince him?
In Igor Voloshin's Nirvana, a simpler model is taken as a basis - the forgotten scenario of the "Country of the Deaf", solved in the entourage of emo-goth-punk-rock-hell-knows-what toilets, hairstyles and stylishly shabby interiors of the Northern capital. Voloshin, it seems, wanted to make a movie about love in conditions of new sincerity, but it turned out to be about how much Petersburg (we were taught at school: a deliberate city!) Is cooler than Moscow. It is clear why the authoritative St. Petersburg producer Sergei Selyanov seized on the promising debutant.
On the other hand, Oksana Bychkova, the herald of the “new sincerity-light” and the singer of the city on the Neva (remember Piter FM?), in her melancholy opus Plus One subtly showed Moscow as a metropolis where it is difficult to walk and almost impossible to unfreeze frozen emotions. Only the British clown-puppeteer (Jethro Skinner) manages to at least briefly bring to life the notorious translator Masha (excellent work of the actress of the Fomenko Theater Madeleine Dzhabrailova), explaining to her on the fingers what freedom is. The movie came out again not about love, but about emancipation, which we, the sick, are taught by guests from neighboring countries. Yes, this difficult science should be learned by many young people. Is it any wonder that another Kinotavr debutant, Mikhail Kosyrev-Nesterov, immediately went to shoot his exotic Ocean in Cuba.
Heroes of our timelessness
Another popular search direction is towards the hero. Do not write them out forever from abroad, as Bychkova did with the charming Jethro Skinner! So far, it works best with antiheroes - such as the weak-willed Valera Dead from Nirvana or the maniac from Andrey Libenson's energetic debutant thriller The One Who Turns Out the Lights; both were played by Artur Smolyaninov. The most expressive of the anti-heroes is the non-professional actor Gela Chitava in Shultes, Bakura Bakuradze, precisely because his character is demonstratively inexpressive. In this slow and intent film, a completely different Moscow is shown on the screen - a dirty, deserted, dangerous city in which anonymity becomes the only form of protection. Schultes runs in the morning, hangs out in bars during the day, and in the evening reads a TV program to his old mother; the rest of the time he is an existential pickpocket, stealing documents from others in order to appropriate someone else's "I" and briefly turn from a ghost into a person.
For this transformation to take place, it is necessary to leave the city. This is the path of the only character who can claim the title of hero in the Kinotavr-2008 scenario, the intelligent young doctor Mitya (Oleg Dolin) from the film Wild Field, who emigrated to the distant Kazakh steppes. The unrealized script of the geniuses of Russian screenwriting, who tragically died early, Petr Lutsik and Alexei Samoryadov, was brought to life by the ex-producer and grandson of the genius 1 Mikhail Kalatozishvili. The mission of the hero is a single-handed struggle against the universal entropy, healing cows from constipation and impoverished farmers from hard drinking, the finale is an inevitable meeting with a madman with a razor in his hand. Potential Western festival hits, these newest 'Young Doctor's Notes' have received the best possible press coverage.
Recipe for Redemption
But the public is not critics, it needs positive. The smartest of the Kinotavr debutants fulfilled an unspoken order. What will get rid of everyday darkness? Of course, Russian spirituality! In the Sochi hall, it manifested itself in the most unexpected forms. For example, in Alexander Melnik's large-scale dystopian thriller New Earth. The film is about how, in the future, criminals sentenced to life imprisonment are referred to Svalbard, in the Arctic: let the creatures devour each other rather than rot for free in state prisons. They suck, literally. All of them were sentenced to death on the screen by the humanistic director (who announced his Orthodox beliefs at a press conference), pardoning only the living embodiment of spirituality - the artist Konstantin Lavronenko. The prototype of his character was clearly Vitaliy Kaloev, and, probably, that is why in the finale the hero flies away from the uncomfortable North on an anecdotal home-made "aeroplane".
But, of course, the apotheosis of morality and morality turned out to be a new opus by no means a debutant, but an eternal friend of youth, Kirill Serebrennikov, based on the script by Yuri Arabov, "Yuryev's Day". An opera diva from Moscow (Ksenia Rappoport), before leaving for permanent residence in Germany, decides to visit her hometown for the last time. While sightseeing, her companion, her twenty-year-old son, suddenly disappears without a trace, and the beauty in a fur coat gets stuck in a vicious circle of a dirty, terrible, but exceptionally holy Russian province. Seems like forever. Or until she realizes that her place is not on the stage, but in the church choir, where the former prima donna (and now a cleaning lady in the prison hospital) will sing soul-saving psalms. Not a movie, but solid repentance.
If this wonderful model does not convince someone that the spiritual search for Russian cinema has been successfully completed, wait just a little more. Pavel Lungin's most Christian opus about the Orthodox Tsar Ivan the Terrible is already on the way.
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1 Mikhail Kalatozov is a Soviet director, winner of the Palme d'Or for the film The Cranes Are Flying.
