Translated material
Roman's happy ending
Thriller "Ghost" directed by Polanski named the best European film of 2010
Under the angelic singing of the Estonian girls' choir, Roman Polanski was proclaimed the main European director of the coming year. At the 23rd European Film Academy Awards (the same ones that used to be called "Felix", and ...
Under the angelic singing of the Estonian girls' choir, Roman Polanski was proclaimed the main European director of the coming year. At the 23rd European Film Academy Awards (the same ones that used to be called "Felix", and then suddenly became nameless), the last film of the master, the political thriller "Ghost", was awarded six awards: best film, screenplay, direction, music, production designer and actor.
Obviously, the touched Polanski did not dare to come to Tallinn, where the ceremony took place. He communicated with the audience via Skype, apparently from a secure safe house, where the tenacious hand of American justice certainly could not overtake him. An elderly British producer went on stage to get the statuettes. Although his noble face was unfamiliar to most of the audience, this gentleman served as a living reminder that the Phantom has nothing to do with Hollywood, being a purely European project (English money, filming was carried out in the pavilions of the German Babelsberg).
The star of “Ghost”, the Scot Ewan McGregor, who recorded a video message from the set from Thailand, could not come to the ceremony: “We are just now shooting another European film,” the laureate joked. Indeed, Eurooscars-2010 showed that the concept of "Europe" today is of a generalized-expanding nature. Take at least two of Polanski's main rivals. The first is the Israeli Shmuel Maoz, whose debut anti-war film-manifesto "Lebanon" was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice a year and a half ago, and now he claimed as many as five statuettes: as a result, he got two - for the camera work of Giora Bezhah and in the nomination " Discovery of the Year. The second is the Turk Semih Kaplanoglu, who was left empty-handed, with a thoughtful meditative parable "Honey", which received the Golden Bear in Berlin last February.
The point is not that Kaplanoglu and Maoz are lesser known than Polanski, or that their films are somehow worse: on the contrary, prestigious festival trophies testify in their favor. It's just that any film academy is more conservative than the juries of Venice, Berlin or Cannes, and for this particular academy, the cosmopolitan and almost dissident Polanski is the embodiment of the European idea. Israeli or Turkish cinematography goes through the department of "promising and promising", it is not yet time for them to receive the main awards. So enough nominations. The media side cannot be discounted either: it is desirable that the recipient be a celebrity, and there is no better candidate for this role than Polanski.
Why was Roman awarded? Obviously not for long service: for it, it seems, he was given an Oscar and the Palme d'Or in 2003, when the pale and secondary Pianist thundered around the planet. It turns out, for suffering - for arrest in Switzerland, for the threat of an American trial and prison? Or is it for a new movie? No one will give a final answer, since the decisions of the film academies are collective: any voter had his own reasons. However, each version has convincing reasons.
Polanski is a lifelong refugee, denying by his existence and career the very idea of "citizenship". In today's globalist Europe, his virtual victory over overseas chicane is not regarded by anyone as an excuse for pedophilia. On the contrary, the unwillingness to obey the ridiculous laws of a foreign country, where he has not lived and worked for a long time, is perceived almost as a feat. The substitution of concepts is smoothly accomplished, and Polanski turns from a former delinquent into a symbol of creative freedom (they tried not to interfere with this freedom - he also managed the workflow from prison, completing the post-production of "Ghost"). Ultimately, the freethinker and libertine Polanski emerged as a defender of the fundamental values of the Old World.
On the other hand, The Phantom, which purists scornfully call "just a thriller," recalls the best years of Polanski - a brilliant master of form, heir to the traditions of Alfred Hitchcock (another European who made many iconic films in Hollywood and was underestimated in his lifetime). Impeccable suspense, play with genre cliches, unpredictable denouement, undeniable political relevance - all this allows us to call "Ghost" the standard of a smart European mainstream that can compete with American samples. And who said that only intellectual or highly spiritual cinema is worthy of awards? Among the former winners of the Eurooscar are such favorites of the public as Amelie and Goodbye, Lenin!, All About My Mother and The Life of Others.
By the way, about the audience. The European Film Academy takes into account their interests not only when voting for nominees, but also when organizing award ceremonies. Undoubtedly, there is not the slightest chance to compete with the real, American, "Oscar" - and it's not only about the budget, not only about prestige, not only about historical roots, but also about how modest the place in the world box office is European cinema in comparison. with Hollywood. The most obvious category, it would seem, is honorary awards for contributions to cinema. Those Americans who are given an honorary Oscar are known throughout the world. How can the composer Gabriel Yared compare with them - at least Juliette Binoche herself gave him an award on the Tallinn stage? Even if you remind the public that he wrote the music for all the films of Anthony Minghella, it is unlikely that the leitmotif from The English Patient will immediately sound in the head of an ordinary movie fan. Or another honorary laureate - the Swiss artist Bruno Ganz. No matter how colorfully the President of the Film Academy Wim Wenders described his merits, he still had to explain that this imposing gentleman was the one who played the angel in Sky Over Berlin and Hitler in The Bunker.
Realizing how rapidly the gap between the simple consumer of a film product and its European producers is growing, the organizers of the Tallinn ceremony conducted an interesting experiment. They showed each nominee film to ordinary people in Estonia, editing a promotional video of the film with direct viewer impressions. So it turned out that the young architect in “Ghost” was most hooked by the ending - she liked the leaves flying in the wind so much that she climbed onto the roof of one of her buildings and dropped a stack of sheets from there, on which her just completed project was printed. The pilot, who watched the French human rights epic about monks and Algerian terrorists “On Gods and Men”, stated that pilots and clergymen are similar to each other. "Honey", which tells the story of a six-year-old stutterer and an autistic person, was shown to a piano maker - but not an ordinary one, but a deaf-mute: he appreciated the suffering of the protagonist, remembering his own childhood. The liveliest reaction was shown by two Russian-speaking Estonian pensioners, former professional athletes: they approved of the heroism of the Israeli tank recruits from the film "Lebanon", but noted that they themselves would not go to such a war and would never go into a tank climbed.
Strikingly, the most sane of the awards presented was awarded not by academicians at all, but by the audience themselves. The "People's Choice" award went to the inventive sci-fi parable "Mr. Nobody" by the Belgian Jaco Van Dormel (which, by the way, became a limited release hit in Russia), and this by no means primitive film about the theory of probability was ahead of such "pop" tapes as " Baaria" by Giuseppe Tornatore, "Education of the Senses" by Lone Scherfig, "Kick-Ass" by Matthew Vaughn and "Soul Kitchen" by Fatih Akin. Polanski's "Ghost" was also on this list, but the audience did not vote for him. Perhaps because the fate of the former British Prime Minister (even a fictional one) is much less interesting to the average cinema visitor than the fate of a mere mortal, "Mr. Nobody", in whom everyone easily recognizes himself.