Translated material
Village diorama
A film adaptation of Rasputin’s story “Live and Remember” has been released in Russia.
The director of the film, Alexander Proshkin, talking about the filming, said that he was shocked by the state of the Russian village (they filmed not on the Angara, but on the lower Volga). Recently, at the Moscow festival, young director Katya Shagalova (competition film “Once Upon a Time in the Province”) also shared her bitter impression of how life is in Podolsk near Moscow. And I remembered our school teacher, who said that an artist must certainly go through a difficult path in life, gain knowledge about life - then he will supposedly have something to write about. We, novice postmodernists, did not believe him; it seemed to us that his view was very Soviet, deterministic, and the main thing in an artist was intuition, taste and sense of form. Now I rather agree with my teacher - it would be nice if our creators had some additional experience. Maybe we should revive creative business trips? Well, or at least potato-picking trips? To be closer to the people and not be horrified by their situation directly on the set...Because the good director Proshkin is terribly far from these people. He wants to be closer - not every modern filmmaker will hire special stage speech teachers to teach actors to reproduce the local dialect. True, the dialect had to be invented, or, at least, compiled, because real viewers would not understand. As a result, the actors speak so infectiously that after watching it you just want to imitate them... But this is not the main thing in the film.
The plot of the story, who remembers, begins with the fact that in the last year of the war in a remote Siberian village, from where almost all the men went to the front, an ax goes missing in the family of a front-line soldier. The young woman Nastena guesses what’s going on: it’s her husband who has secretly returned. He became a deserter and is hiding in the forest. All winter she visits him at his abandoned winter hut, and by spring it turns out that the secret family life has not passed without a trace, Nastena is expecting a child, so now the whole village is aware of the return of the fugitive. It is humanly impossible to resolve this situation, for Rasputin this is the most difficult thing: the soul of the main character, Nastena, who involuntarily, but violated the moral law, is empty, and she dies from fatigue, but the fate of her husband Andrei is no longer of interest to the writer.
Everything is different in the film. You don’t really believe in the bitter and difficult pre-war life of this flexible Nastena... There is a lot of playfulness in her, not extinguished by life. Nastena, played by Daria Moroz, is not a woman, but rather a girl, and because of her childishness, she doesn’t seem to think about what will come out of her unexpected romantic adventure. Whether the director wanted it or not, his film was about a tender young woman, full of life, ready for love and happiness and instead driven, ruined by ugly and unrelated circumstances to real life. And along with her, people’s life as a whole fell into decline, because Nastena was an angel, quiet, resigned, unrequited, but selfless and loving. In order to make this idea clearer, the ending of the film was completed by the director - first there is a long scene of the wake for Nastya, where the women friends will tell you in plain text who is the angel and who the devil is. And then the finale itself: a steamboat sails along the Angara, glorifying the twentieth anniversary of the Victory, and on the shore, instead of the celebrated Atamanovka, even in a war full of life, there are terrible ruins, among which wanders the lonely man, who does not remember his kinship, the wild man Guskov, the one who did not leave offspring, did not continue the family line, did not save his wife, through whose fault it seems that the ruins now stand, blackened by the failures of the windows.
The impoverishment of the Russian village, the film proves, did not even begin with the Patriotic War, in which almost the entire people were killed, but earlier - and Proshkin develops Rasputin’s hint, in one of the paragraphs he casually mentioned Uncle Andrei, who fled from Kolchak to his homeland and was caught there. In the film, a mother cries at night about her murdered brother, and Andrei finds this belt in his winter hut and howls like a wolf over him, because he understands: there is no way out, his fate is the same as his uncle's... But Andrei Guskov, played by Mikhail Evlanov , there is no past - he is such a museum shaggy man with a beard, the function of brutality: they say, the longer he lives in a deep forest, the more he becomes a wild animal, a predator. Alas, this is the problem of the whole film - somehow, despite the fact that it is shot professionally, cleanly, clearly, it still leaves a feeling of commonplace. A diligent illustration of a well-known thesis, for the proof of which very correct, but boring words are used. And in any case, in my opinion, this film has nothing to do with the life and death of the Russian village.
Still, it’s not boring to watch. The way Sergei Makovetsky, Evgenia Glushenko, Anna Mikhalkova play is more of an attraction, but an entertaining attraction and, in the end, of high quality. Both the camera work and the text spoken by the characters are all well done and thought out. Another thing is that there was no need to talk about the village, about Russia, but it would have been better just about one specific Nastena. Look, then it would have turned out to be about something else. Of course.