Difficulties of socialization in the film "Martha Marcy May Marlene"

Movie premiere

Today, the psychological thriller “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is released. Its director, Sean Durkin, won the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago and became one of the most promising debutants of 2011. LIDIA MASLOVA watched the newcomer's first steps along the path paved by Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Haneke, not without emotion.

"Martha Marcy May Marlene" is a fairly typical production for an American debutant who must show professionalism and cinematic culture with a minimum of expressive and financial resources before they decide to entrust him with something big and real, like "Transformers" or "Mission: Impossible." Sean Durkin plays his first directorial role with a confident, firm hand, choosing as a trump card an interesting girl with a complex inner world, who is either gradually losing her mind, or is already crazy from the very beginning - in this situation, the success of the enterprise largely depends on the choice of the performer leading role, and in this case it turned out to be correct, perhaps due to its non-obviousness. “Martha” is only the second full-length film for 22-year-old Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of the notorious twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who literally from the cradle followed the frivolous serial-advertising-entertainment path. No less pretty, but apparently smarter, the younger sister also acted from the age of four, but at ten she decided to pause her acting career and grow up a little, but now she will certainly be able to catch up, and it is possible that, if circumstances go well, not only a Hollywood star, but also a serious dramatic actress.

Elizabeth Olsen plays a girl who exists, as it were, simultaneously in two parallel worlds - restrained and self-absorbed, Sean Durkin’s film, which does not turn anyone’s soul inside out before the viewer, adheres to a slightly Buddhist concept of time: there is no past or future in it, but everything that happened or will happen to the heroine, happens simultaneously, that is, now. Nevertheless, the film, which has no end (in accordance with the very honorable, as well as convenient, arthouse tradition of casually ending the narrative mid-sentence), has a certain conventional beginning - when the heroine leaves a certain forest commune of a somewhat hippie persuasion, where she lived under named Marcy May, and calls her older sister (Sarah Paulson), who has not heard anything for two years from her younger sister Martha, who has disappeared without a trace. Well, for the rest of the time, the director spends the rest of his time drawing moderately subtle, moderately banal parallels between the sect, from which the heroine not only escaped, but somehow quietly self-destructed, evaporated, and the family (while Marta lived in the forest, her sister got married for an Englishman played by Hugh Dancy), where she is not exactly eager to fit in, but behaves just as indifferently as in the forest commune.

The transitions between sectarian reality and family reality are made in “March” smoothly and deftly, so that the feeling of the simultaneity of what is happening is preserved, and the crude functional word “flashback” seems inappropriate - either the knock of a hammer serves as a bridge between the two worlds, then, having dived into the lake, on the shore of which her sister’s house stands, Martha emerges as Marcy May, surrounded underwater by the naked bodies of her neighbors in the forest commune. One of the curious things that attracts attention is that the leader of the commune (John Hawkes), who in some way regards it as his harem (he spends a ritual night of initiation with each of the new girls), behaves in many ways similar to Martina’s husband sisters, also confident that he is in charge here, and not wanting to endure the discomfort due to the fact that his wife suddenly discovered a sister with oddities. Marta, on the other hand, innocently brings her communal habits into the family life of “normal” relatives - for example, she calmly enters the bedroom in the middle of the night where her sister and her husband are having sex, and lies down on the edge of the bed, and once at dinner in response to her business-minded son-in-law’s attempt to socialize her and to find out her “life plans” unexpectedly baffles him with the remark that a person can simply exist without necessarily exhausting himself with thoughts about work and career. The convenience of the dual dramatic construction chosen by director Derkin also lies in the fact that when you don’t know where to turn a conversation in one reality, you can quietly and accurately move to another, thus maintaining the necessary balance between the absence of obvious action and that hidden action hidden from the viewer , which unfolds in the soul of the heroine, who, although she has as many as four names, cannot openly discover or present a single real personality and remains equally impenetrable both in a forest squat and in a bourgeois living room.

The secret behind four seals