War won't write off

"Anticipation" by Nikita Mikhalkov did not save neither the scenery nor the declaration

1. It would be better for this film to remain a legend. So that people participate, and money is spent, and each participant believes that he has contributed to a great cause, and the audience believes that ten years of the life of Nikita Mikhalkov and one and a half thousand of his ...

1. It would be better for this film to remain a legend. So that people take part, and money is spent, and each participant believes that he has contributed to a great cause, and the audience believes that ten years of the life of Nikita Mikhalkov and one and a half thousand of his associates were not wasted in vain. And the picture would somehow be hidden under the pretext of the author's perfectionism. Oh my God, it could have been more heartwarming.

Writing about The Anticipation (the first part of the military sequel to Burnt by the Sun) is very difficult. And not because it is a complex movie, but because the director has lost the basic concepts, and without them the conversation does not work. Everything must be built anew, or even to abandon the criteria altogether, recognizing that a new era has come, the measure and symbol of which is Mikhalkov. You can't stop him or convince him. You can either withdraw, squeamishly sympathizing with those who have been tempted, or join a new cult and see for yourself how it will end. And rational analysis is powerless here.

You will start talking about plot coherence, logic, a sense of proportion and taste, or rather, about their complete absence - “and this is such a genre”, called “late Mikhalkov”, already announced in “12”. Tragic lubok, or whatever its name is. You will say that it is not worthwhile to compare four years of filming with four years of war and publish in this publication twenty interviews of actors, screenwriters and props who unanimously call Mikhalkov the great, - but after all, it did not start yesterday, it has long since assumed burlesque forms and does not bother anyone. Under all this given the Kremlin Palace of Congresses.

The cinematic style of the late Mikhalkov is an extremely adequate aesthetic expression of the Putin era, when polemics are also meaningless. A cult of petty and dubious personalities? Fascist youth organizations with spiritual molestation of minors and outright persecution of dissidents? Ultimate cynicism, the dominance of personal closeness to the body over all other criteria? A catastrophic decline in the intellectual level of the country in everything from cinema and television to ideological doctrine? Vseprodazhnost and permissiveness? Manipulation and speculation with the great past, which you did not forge, but privatized? They just look at you with blue eyes and simply say: “Yes. And what?"

Never mind. Shrug your shoulders and walk away.

1. If you still try to analyze this movie, abstracting from the personality and social activity of the creator - although such an approach is hardly legitimate, because Mikhalkov, as he put it in this picture with exhaustive completeness, - factual claims should be dismissed immediately. “Unreliable”, “it didn’t happen like that”, you can’t shit on the deck from an airplane, fascist tanks didn’t have sails, girls don’t talk to mines - all this has nothing to do with cinema. Movies often show something that does not happen at all, but an artist is an artist to convince. If there are historical perplexities, this indicates only one thing: he did not convince.

Mikhalkov has an impenetrable argument for this: he is not shooting a historical picture, but a folk myth. But if you are filming a folk myth, why be so proud of the accuracy of the smallest details, the tailoring of five thousand accurately stylized costumes, the re-equipment and repainting of unique tanks? Let's make up our minds: if we have a myth, many requirements are abolished, such as psychological portrayal, factual and motivational reliability, historical truth, etc. But new ones appear (it's a shame to recall the notorious basic things, but if they are so firmly forgotten!). Firstly, the myth does not combine with the grotesque, they don’t laugh in the church - and Mikhalkov has an unreasonably lot of this grotesque, more than even in The Barber. In myths, they do not write how the head of the pioneer camp writes, and they do not write protocols about how Pushkin A.S. wounded Dantes J.

But the main thing is that titans act in myths, and not enigmas, in whose greatness we believe in the word; in myths there are large-scale characters, each of which is given by a single dominant feature, and not the types of provincial drama, marked by a funny word, habit or accent. Finally, the myth is not built from scratch - it sets the picture of the world, which means it is built around the concept; but traces of this concept in "Anticipation" will not be found even by the most intent spectator.

The idea that in order to gain personal happiness or avoid mortal danger it is recommended to believe in God and help your neighbor cannot underlie the new myth, for it is well known. The idea that the Russian people in everyday life is cruel and indifferent, but in moments of great danger demonstrates great qualities, is not bad because it smells of Russophobia, but because it has been expressed hundreds of times. A myth without a worldview is a cake without flour. So the argument does not falter. Let us also mention that the myth is characterized by narrative coherence, narrative unity, an integral monumental style - it is not told at random, with a lot of other people's quotes. Ascetic simplicity is inherent in the myth, see Popogrebsky's "How I Spent This Summer": you can make a lot of complaints about this picture, but the style is just that, Rockwell Kent.

However, it is precisely in the absence of this conceptual unity that the main blunder lies: Nikita Mikhalkov took up military cinema not because he had something new to say about the war, but because he watched Saving Private Ryan and lamented the lack of us - the main winners - the same expensive, loud and convincing picture. That is, it seemed to him, apparently, that high cost and loudness were enough for persuasiveness.

Spielberg had a specific humanistic message, not new (and there is no claim to myth), but intelligible: the uniqueness and preciousness of every life, the fundamental difference between American military doctrine and any other, etc.

Mikhalkov's concept is so lacking that the following hedonistic morality is eventually given out for it: let every viewer, after watching the film, vividly feel how insignificant all his problems are, what happiness it is to just sleep in a clean bed, breathe, buy ice cream, etc. “But in order to get to the bottom of these truths, you don’t have to go down to the underworld,” and even more so spend $ 42 million.

The perfect inner emptiness naturally turns into the absence of a core: in the "Expectation" there are several disintegrating, mechanically connected short stories, the best of which are made at the level of a good Soviet military movie. Such is the October episode with the Kremlin cadets noted by everyone, although it falls short of the epic film "Liberation": the cadets' dialogues are unconvincing, quarrels and reconciliations are artificial, but Yevgeny Mironov's wonderful organics save this fragment; the only pity is that before shooting himself, his hero - otherwise reliable - has to utter a coherent monologue with his guts turned out on the topic "Where are the artillery, aviation and Stalin."

To paraphrase Academician Vinogradov's review of Stalin's work Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, what is new in Anticipation is false, and what is true is not new. The story of a little gypsy singing for the Germans so that they would not kill her was taken from Adamovich's chronicles (but placed in a different context, so that its authenticity is completely lost: not a single five-year-old girl will sing and dance at the sight of her parents' corpses; in such cases, it's a stretch just blasphemous). The episode with the burning of the village is literally taken from Klimov's Come and See.

The evacuation of the pioneer camp under the bombing (in the book it is an orphanage) - from the "Young Guard", and Fadeev's is stronger. A company of Kremlin cadets that came to the front is from Vorobyov's story "Killed near Moscow", and Vorobyov's is also better. Only the lazy did not write about the too obvious and, most importantly, in no way motivated quote from Cameron's Titanic. Sergei Garmash, unhooking from a mine, like DiCaprio from a piano, and the whole scene of baptism under fire are generally beyond good and evil, but taste, as we know, is not necessary for a genius.

In War and Peace, for example, or in the best war films like The Cranes, there are scenes that are unreliable and, from the point of view of taste, faulty, but artistic power redeems everything; Nikita Mikhalkov's problem is precisely that, having thrown into battle all the reserves - both his own and the state ones - he did not achieve victory. Artistic persuasiveness and, most importantly, artistic power in his picture is sorely lacking: most of all, it resembles partly parodic, and partly respectful pastiche on the themes of Soviet battle art, with the difference that Mikhalkov’s heroes in moments of danger do not commemorate the party, but the Lord God.

The substance of the new Mikhalkov cinema is a strange substance in which Soviet, Russian and Evangelical symbols, Stalinist and anti-Stalinist clichés, fragments of other people's concepts and quotations from other people's masterpieces float intermixedly - and all this without a hint of unity and meaning; it is a pure disintegration of a consciousness that has lost all conception of itself and the world—and this disintegration is contagious. Otherwise, Maxim Sukhanov would not have said in an interview published in the same journal “Friend among Strangers”: “I believe that a serious conversation about the war will not be out of place in our era, when completely inappropriate irony and sarcasm prevail in relation to the feat of the people ".

What?! Where?! Who do they predominate in our time?! In Nikita Mikhalkov, whose Caucasian sapper, in the first days of the war, mines the bridge in the first days of the war, peers from below through the cracks between the boards under women's skirts? Then say so, please.

3. The late Nikita Mikhalkov, having probably realized his own aesthetic ceiling, although not admitting it to himself, furnishes his own work with a variety of non-aesthetic circumstances that would make it possible to ignore artistic weakness. He takes it either by the scale of presentations and spending, or by proximity to the authorities (up to the most servile film "55", in comparison with which "Our dear Nikita Sergeevich" of 1961 looks like reckless nonconformism), then by addressing topics of national importance and timing the paintings to the holidays of paramount importance. values.

He sincerely hopes that the war will write everything off - as it always wrote off everything in the USSR. Evgeny Margolit, in an essay on Gaidar, expressed the exact idea that without a constant and importunate, dissolving in the air foreboding of war, the era of pre-war terror would have been unthinkable - mobilization psychosis made it possible to explain any internal atrocities, from repressions to the Molotov Pact.

War is a universal justification, and it is natural for the Soviet regime (in many respects it remains so) to borrow from the future: something will happen and justify everything. Either it will be communism and the distribution of apartments, or a global cataclysm, in order to prepare for which everything is possible. The present is never sufficient on its own. It is always justified either by the heroic past or the mobilization future.
Many - including the author of these lines - sincerely hoped that Mikhalkov's film would turn out to be a masterpiece and write off all the director's art. Did not happen. Today, however, we are again invited to think that the most important thing is ahead, that in October Citadel will be shown, and here in it ... The tangled lines will converge in it, father, daughter and Colonel Arsentiev will meet, Dostoevsky depths and Tolstoy heights will appear, and $42 million will fully reveal themselves on the screen not only as bumblebees, butterflies and keys on tank tracks, but also as a deafening cannonade, and an attack of many thousands, and the personal presence of the prime minister at the premiere.

Life in expectation of justification goes on, because forever waiting from oneself and others for a masterpiece and a feat that will redeem everything is much easier than soberly admitting that oranges will not be born from aspen.