They were shooting...

“Mirage” by Tigran Keosayan on Moscow screens

In the pouring rain at a night airfield, a man with no name, but with the nickname Trapper and the imprint of a stormy military past on a deceptively calm face (Dmitry Maryanov), receives from a gentleman with the appearance of the leader of the Day Watch, Zabulon (Viktor Verzhbitsky), a task: to find him in the Arabian sands and return him to Moscow his daughter Leroux (Alena Khmelnitskaya). The order has been accepted. In order to more accurately find out the whereabouts of the fugitive, the Trapper has to intimidate someone, hang someone upside down over the railway tracks, but in the end he finds himself in the desert, where Lera, along with almost random fellow travelers - the typical blonde from jokes, Ulyana ( Antonina Komissarova) and Tanya, a highly spiritual fool with glasses who would hardly have passed the casting even in the first episodes of the epic “Don’t Be Born Beautiful” (Natalia Naumova), found themselves in a not very pleasant situation: cackling bearded men on horses and with firearms at the ready carrying them with very clear goals to a certain client who desired harem pleasures. Luckily for the girls, there are also two young people nearby - Misha (Alexey Bardukov) and Zhendos (Alexey Chadov), who got lost during the excursion. As a result of unexpectedly successful military operations, the guys recapture the captives and find themselves in the Dead City, in the ruins of which they discover a weapons warehouse, a cache with a huge amount of drugs, as well as a Hunter, who strongly advises young people not to waste time and quickly arm themselves: dust is already swirling on the horizon. the hooves of the “hottabych” Bedouins, led by the charismatic villain Jamal (Rustam Urazaev) - they need girls, they need drugs and they don’t need extra witnesses. Pretty soon it turns out that Trapper and Jamal are very familiar with each other; that the drugs mysteriously disappeared and there was no amicable agreement with the bandits; that Lera is not anyone’s daughter... Therefore, the boys and girls have no choice but to take a last drag from the last hidden joint and jerk the automatic shutters.

“This is all some kind of mirage,” the characters in the film repeat every now and then, refusing to believe in the reality of what is happening. In principle, the filmmakers don’t particularly argue with them - it’s unlikely that even the bluest eye will be able to take what’s happening on the screen at face value. “Mirage” by Tigran Keosayan (by the way, the son of Edmond Keosayan, who at one time gave several generations of grateful moviegoers “The Elusive Avengers”, as quite funny quotes remind us) is one of those films whose title includes not just a word, but a genre definition (like as in "Pulp Fiction", "Detective" or "Scary Movie"). In the Middle Eastern haze of hot air, blurry shadows of unforgotten ancestors appear every now and then - the same "Avengers", "White Sun of the Desert", Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns or action films from the studios of the union republics about the fight against the Basmachi. But cinema still cannot be reduced to the usual postmodern quotation. Of course, this work is more than uneven. For every successful joke, there are two or three that pass. The plot either stalls or gallops, leaving not the most difficult questions unanswered. Comic adventures suddenly give way to very real violence, and the cranberry juice of the adventurous comedy every now and then begins to acquire the salty taste of real violence (however, the unexpected and brutal murder of one of the heroines is connected, perhaps, not so much with the excessive bloodthirstiness of the authors, but with the simple fact that the screenwriters they were never able to separate the characters into full-fledged and convincing pairs - so they removed the extra one). But nevertheless, in “Mirage” there is a healthy (or vice versa, unhealthy - depending on how you think) element of completely deceitful game, which allows you to get sincere pleasure at least for a while. It is absolutely incomprehensible why special forces soldiers use the song by Matvey Blanter and Alexey Fatyanov “There are no empty seats on the bench where you sit” as a password - but they do! And when warlike Bedouins gallop in slow motion to the accompaniment of a lyrical chant, and smoke from the potion burned by the heroes rushes towards them, you don’t want to rub your eyes in amazement at all. A mirage is just that: a mirage.

Stanislav F. ROSTOTSKY