Brother-3

The Stoker, a new film by Alexei Balabanov, is being released. Everything according to the usual recipe: colorful bandits, few words, many corpses, a huge public outcry

Director Alexei Balabanov fell on the head of the Russian people like a curse. There is no way to get rid of him. He does not want to calm down, spit, wave his hand. You won't be able to miss his films past your ears and eyes (even if you haven't seen them). Someone will certainly say: “But at Balabanov, they heard what a horror ...” Each time, sometimes more, sometimes less talented, Balabanov pulls the Russian soul by the beard and does not allow it to calm down in bourgeois stability. With his "Brothers" he terrorized public taste and consciousness, with "Cargo-200" he tore such a stinking mental heap that, probably, the smell lasted for a year. “The Stoker” is akin to these films, although it is made much calmer, more delicate, with some even lyricism, which is hauntingly evoked by the fidgety music of the Belarusian virtuoso guitarist Valery Diduli. She accompanies the entire film, practically not falling silent - as a result, at first it makes her feel bad, and then, when you get used to it, it turns out that you can’t go anywhere without her. According to the director, Didula makes half of the picture. And it is true.

Exercises of Didula seem to be written for the southern beach, say, Anapa or Sochi. And here in the frame is eternal winter, some unfriendly Russian city with snowdrifts, old trams, barracks, gangster jeeps, a factory and a boiler room. In it sits a shell-shocked Yakut stoker, a major, a hero of the Soviet Union who served in Afghanistan. A former colleague, a sniper sergeant, periodically visits him, who, together with a couple of assistants, bring the corpses of businessmen, officials, deputies, bandits and other citizens ordered for one reason or another to the boiler room. The sergeant weaves some fables about what they all “deserved”, while the major, meanwhile, uses two fingers to type on a typewriter a story about a Russian Khailakh, a Siberian convict who was put into the house of a Yakut. Khailakh began to torture the owner, rape his wife, but the Yakut endured.

The story "Hailakh" was published at the beginning of the last century by the Polish writer, ethnographer and public figure Vatslav Seroshevsky. For participation in the labor movement in Poland, as well as for resisting the police, he was convicted and exiled to Yakutia, where he spent 12 years (1880-1892). In general, the plot of his story became the basis of Balabanov's film, at the end of which, before the credits, the director placed a short silent film adaptation of Seroshevsky's work exactly to the place to which the major managed to print.

Actually, the film "Stoker" itself is not particularly talkative. The shell-shocked Yakut barely pronounces the words, as if he had forgotten the Russian language. The former sergeant speaks in short aphorisms that persistently return us to the speech space of the "Brothers". Bizon's henchman, an example of Balabanov's deadly humor, utters five or six words in the whole picture, while being the central figure in a dramatic love triangle. Bison takes turns sleeping with the daughters of the sergeant, his boss, and the major.

Balabanov, it seems, does not like gangster romance, as well as the recognition of criminal law as the norm of life. He, in theory, should not like the film "Boomer", even though he works with the same producer Selyanov. One could say about the bandits from "Kochegar" that they are normal guys, not even evil, just "life is like this", if it were not for the inhibited Yakut major, the hero of the Soviet Union. Balabanov has a completely unfunny, non-travesty hero, although he looks like a sad clown, especially when he puts on his dress uniform, setting off, like a real Yakut samurai, to avenge his daughter.

In The Stoker, Balabanov reduced his speech almost to lowing. Potentially rich thriller story, up to a conditional fairy tale lubok, told in an extremely schematic way with an unexpectedly Muratov intonation, and even with curly guitar picking. The meaning was reduced to a bitter summary: the Russian is a monster-hailakh, the Yakut is a martyr-hero. Regardless of which side you are on, life in a soulless snow-covered city is not for either one or the other. Sooner or later, everyone will go into the insatiable firebox, which indifferently accepts both victims and rapists. If in "Morphia" Balabanov's misanthropy broke into hysterics and strangled both common sense and artistic form, then in "The Stoker" the form is flawlessly carved. The director is ironic, collected and calm, but merciless as always. And as always, he runs into a violent public reaction.