World of Fasteners

There are two obvious tendencies focused by the Kinotavr festival program. The directors unexpectedly revealed a fiery passion for almanacs and - which is completely unexpected - for colorful comedies, which I counted five in the competition.

“Now we need something big about modernity,” and you have all the stories, the publishers say to the author in the film by Mikhail Segal. And throw his manuscript into the wastebasket. The manuscript begins to travel around the publishing house, turning everyone who flips through it into the hero of another short story. The film “Stories” grew out of the short film “The World of Fasteners”, which last year received the prize of the Kinotavr: Short Film competition. In it, the event manager paints the bride and groom first a detailed plan from the wedding (feng shui recommendations, push-ups on the fists, inflating balloons with “good wishes”), and then paints the “location” of their future: from lovers and mistresses, the number of children - to the order funeral. And the manager's eye (brilliant work by Andrey Merzlikin) sparkles like a mephistopheles, drills through a couple of next cute idiots. The second chapter "Roundabout" is a social anecdote about corruption bail. An auto mechanic takes a bribe for a left inspection, the head of the OVIR takes a bribe for a passport from an auto mechanic, then a full cycle “from hand to hand”: admission to a university, an operation for a sick mother, construction of an apartment, land from the governor for development. At the right time, the symbolic Karamzin cry “They steal!” rename to "Berut!" The climax: the president on a white horse (Igor Ugolnikov) strictly educates the emaciated Oryol governor (“If anyone is against stability ... support the state line”), he reinforces the moralizing sermon with quotes from Klyuchevsky, Alexei Tolstoy and, of course, Karamzin. The circle ends in a car service to the accompaniment of a presidential television speech against corruption. This means that the cost of a bribe for “TO” has doubled. The heroine of the mystical novel "Energy Crisis" is a provincial librarian, fueled by energy at the shelves with classics (Pushkin, Prishvin). A cavalcade of operatives waits on a rainy road for orders from a well-read psychic grandmother who, with the help of poetry, discovers a missing child. The librarian is the guardian of the outgoing culture, the last of the mastodons. And when the pages with “Eugene Onegin”, her “good friend”, are burning, the grandmother herself, like a column of fire, disappears into the sky along with the entire culture of the 19th century. The theme of the classics, so famously launched by the president, and the theme of the irresistible gap between generations, is continued by the fourth short story “And the Flame Will Kindle”. The publisher falls in love with a young body, extremely delightful, used by the publisher strictly for its intended purpose: in a car, apartment, toilet. Gradually, the primitive savagery of the worldview of the “beautiful stranger” is becoming clear, for which Dzerzhinsky is a writer, chicks live in the Cheka, urks are a kind of orcs, Stalin canceled excesses, and the Germans reached IKEI during the war. "What's the fuck with you?" – the elderly man desperately exclaims. And this spiritual cry becomes the phrase of the day at the festival.

At the end of the film, the author of the book of stories (the famous rapper Vladislav Leshkevich) reads a rap superimposed on the eternal anthem of our unprecedented homeland. Journalists asked Ugolnikov how he worked on the image of the president. After a long pause, a prominent figure in the Russian-Belarusian union answered by telegraph: “I learned the text in advance. I flew to the shooting, they gave me a white horse. Filmed one day. So we have presidents removed.

“The White Moor, or Three Stories of My Neighbors” (pictured) also breaks down into interrelated plots. They suffer from jealousy, unrequited feelings, loneliness, betrayal: actors, businessmen and other representatives of the middle class. Director Dmitry Fiks and screenwriter Maxim Stishov, who had gained a hand in serial projects (like “... All the men are their own ...”), sought to jump out of the attraction of the series into a genre movie about intricate human ties with Woodiallen's intonation. It didn’t work out with intonation, it came out strained and feigned. Throughout the action, the main character (Andrey Sokolov) plays a white moor on stage, who strangles Desdemona. He does it mediocrely, artisanally. Even after the film, there is a feeling that Woody Allen is being played in a provincial theater with the participation of amateur actors.

A den of stories, completed on the territory of a dilapidated house and is called "Emergency Condition" . This is the debut of Vsevolod Beningsen, an interesting writer whose stories are full of irony and grotesque. But when the word is transferred to the screen, it de-energizes, loses its brutality, embodied in stamped images, pale shadows of many films. Makabra doesn't work. For a long time and painfully, a couple of conscientious, but cowardly inhabitants naturally ruin the young man, the son of the deputy mayor. They bury him alive, nailing him with a shovel (Before that, a couple unintentionally crushed his legs, and hiding the crime, they finish him off. And the legs of the bloody boy turned out to be iron). In this film, plot round dances are led by a pregnant aunt who has completely lost her memory, and a paralytic who is dying in the absence of her daughter (who has lost her memory), and a child suffering from congenital deformity.

In the best of the short stories, a man of Caucasian nationality is trying, with a weapon in his hands, to recapture his infant daughter from the wife of an alcoholic and her roommate. As a result, a mass shootout is organized with the participation of cops, Caucasians and just peaceful neighbors. “Our future” remains alive: cops and a child.

Humor, taste, a feeling of living breath that soared on the book pages, disappeared from the screen, there was an anguish that frapped the viewer.

In addition, the film was shown immediately after Vasily Sigarev's monstrously heavy, tragic fresco “To Live” (so far the strongest work of the competition), about which Novaya had already written, and in which different stories grow together into a common “body of pain”. The viewer is shaken by the cry of loss (daughters, beloved, father). Sigarev, like a mystical librarian, is imbued with the energy of the literary traditions of the Urals from Bazhov's tales to Ryzhy's "sick" poems. His film is a roar that breaks into a whisper of despair (the selfless acting arbots of Yana Troyanov and Olga Lapshina): “Why do I want to shout to you: Love each other, maybe because you don’t do it?” “To live” is a powerful holistic statement, with all the horror that is happening on the screen, calling for light. “I left from the middle of the film,” a well-known TV presenter is looking for sympathy from me, “why does the director torment me, I went to the mainstream ...” I had to write out the name “spectator cinema” for him from the catalog. But the best recommendation is to go to a network cinema: apparently, only Hollywood will fully satisfy him.

And yet, one cannot help but wonder: why does the "almanac" become a magnet that attracts current authors. Suppose, in the case of Segal, it was rather a technological moment. Although no. Among the complaints against the director was the following: your novels are in no way connected by a cross-cutting theme. But, it seems to me, for the author this kaleidoscopicity is the form that determines the content of modern society, which cannot be defined by one problem, one general conflict. The pieces of glass of the tragicomic kaleidoscope are spinning, and inside it they do not grow together into a common whole: past and present, culture and barbarism, everyday routine and mysticism, rust of corruption and high-tech rituals of office plankton. How can one not recall the title of Sehgal's first short film, The World of Fasteners. Deprived of historical memory, our society resembles a machine in which screws, bolts, washers, nuts, threaded studs live on their own, crumbling in the absence of a "solution". “If we do not understand ourselves, in our past, in that damned time that made us such,” says Alexander Proshkin, who is filming Friedrich Gorenstein’s story “Atonement,” we are in danger of disintegration.

By the way, the “almanac”, so welcomed by “Kinotavr”, translated from Arabic means “time”, “measure”. In ancient times, with the help of almanacs, people compiled calendars of the current time and made astrological forecasts for the future ...