Dead daughters

The American Sundance television channel began showing the French series Les Revenants. Oddly enough, this is perhaps the most important event on television for a year.

A small town in the Alps, cut off from the world with a giant dam, is paralyzed by grief: a bus with schoolchildren crashed a few years ago. Each parent experiences the loss of children in their own way. Someone goes to endless meetings at school to discuss the design of the monument to the dead. Someone divorced. Someone is trying to get pregnant again. One evening, all this ceases to matter: the dead are returning to the city. They don’t remember their deaths: they only know that they went on an excursion with friends, but woke up on an alpine lawn. Following schoolchildren, other dead people appear: a maniac killed many years ago; his victims; Strange old woman; The musician, allegedly committed with him ten years ago right at the altar. They look completely alive, only they eat a lot and almost do not sleep. The real living meanwhile quickly begin to regret that their prayers have reached the addressee. Some kind of disaster is approaching. As if in a mockery of an important position for Western civilization that “everything flows”, the water level behind the dam falls. The ruins of a mysterious settlement and dead animals are found on the shacking bottom. It seems that this funnel is about to leak everything that is so expensive to Europeans.

Haut et court, a debut of Belgium and Sweden a year ago in France, Belgium and Sweden, became a small sensation. Critics together declared his European version of the Linchevsky Twin Pix (before that the title belonged to the “kingdom” of Lars von Trier) and demanded additives. While the French are leisurely shooting the second season, the British halve made a clone ( in the Flesh , the BBC Three channel) and bought the rights to a full adaptation. The Americans are also preparing their version on A&E Network , we have known for the series Longmair and Bates Hotel. It is easy to imagine how it will look. The school bus will be scolded by football players, chirlaiders and twilight teenagers. The ancient settlement will be Indian. The maniac will make the main striker of the show. The role of a sheriff will be called an actor who has been playing the police for half a century. At least with the previous import from Europe - an excellent Scandinavian series "Most" and the beautiful Dutch "red widow" - it turned out that way.

It is much more interesting to figure out why Les Revenants needed the American Sundance Channel in its original form. It is difficult to imagine that this Alpen Gold will have to taste and teeth with American subscribers: despite the success of critics, he was reluctant to look at his native Europe. And the Sundance Channel cannot be suspected of unnecessary money: in this fall, on a paid channel, they began to twist the advertisement. “Les Revenants” , however, is extremely important for rebranding, the launched Sundance Channel about a year ago.

From 1996 to 2012, the channel was primarily a relay of the Independent Film Festival of Robert Redford of the same name. Ether was formed from specific copyright films from around the world and documentary programs - not only about cinema. For example, in the scientific and cognitive program “Green Porno”, Isabella Rossellini imitated the sexual habits of insects. The channel went to the channel from senior comrades - first the channel owned Showtime , then AMC . The latter showed his hit “Breaking Bad” on Sundance , a drama about a chemistry teacher, which became a drug lord. Her finale this year set two media records - by the number of spectators and by the number of texts that followed the show that "TV will never be the same."

In 2013, Sundance began release of its own series. His first works, however, can be called independent only half. The RECTIM drama has been nurtured by the AMC maternal company for four years, and the Top of the Lake thriller was shot together with the British BBC Two and New Zealand UKTV . Nevertheless, both shows shot and were declared examples of highly artistic TV, even such conservatives as Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas recognized this year this year.

They don’t remember their deaths: they only know that they went on an excursion with friends, but woke up on an alpine lawn.

“Rectify” is the story of a small and extra person Daniel Holden, who is still a teenager accused of rape with the murder and sentenced to death. After twenty years of endless cassations, he temporarily released: the DNA test showed that the deceased queen of the graduation ball had other partners. Like the dead people who returned to Les Revenants , the hero is equally inconvenient for everyone - the family in which the new owner; the prosecutor whose political career will collapse if an error is opened; classmates involved in the murder; Simple embittered townspeople who believed the media for twenty years. In general, the eternal Holden once again finds himself over the abyss in rye.

“Top of the Lake” is a provincial thriller shot by the Great Jane Campion. She was always interested in the wars and the armistice of the sexes, and the New Zealand open spaces with their Tolkien via turned out to be a suitable field for the next battle. A 12-year-old girl disappears in the small city of Laiktope. It is known that she was pregnant, so it is much more interesting for residents to catch and lynch the pedophile than to save a schoolgirl. The father of the heroine with his sons-lecturers participates most in the hunt. A female sect falls under a hot hand - the victims of unfortunate marriages and domestic violence living in freight containers. They are led by the real queen of strangers. Between all these groups, a detective, Robin Gryffin, who looks like a mortally tired Dana Scully, is carefully advocated from the capital.

Both “Rectify” and “Top of the Lake” are methaseriacs, slow and insecure even compared to existential dramas like “ Mad Men " . Nothing happens here, but nothing can be fascinated. While the cinema was chasing the technical 3D, 3D narrative and sensual appeared on television. We got used to the narrative in the zero, completely immersed in the enveloping drama of the series Showtime , AMC , Starz and HBO , each of which was striving to write his own great American novel. Sundance Channel series are far from literature and prefer to speak in the cinema - more precisely, in the dialect that can only be heard at the Sandance Film Festival. One of the largest independent filmings of the planet can be treated differently. For example, it can be assumed that his mission is reduced to collecting attempts by modern barbarians to play classic European cinema.

The series Sundance Channel is the derivative of this festival, which unexpectedly turned out to be more than its primary. The French Les Revenants not only fits perfectly into the format of the American channel, but also expands its judicial powers in the industry. Sundance from now on is not only an international film, but also a television festival. Against the backdrop of talk that TV is about to be the last shelter of the author’s cinema, this seems a very logical move.

More importantly, Les Revenants clearly explains the aesthetic criteria of the new festival. There is almost no narrative here, and contact with the viewer is established at the level of feelings. Each frame is like a museum installation. Especially the authors of the roads, oddly enough, is the "Solaris" of Andrei Tarkovsky - more precisely, its earthly part. Les Revenants has a lot of experiments with images. When it is necessary to show the viewer that the father of the family became a stranger, the illuminators manage to turn it into a black shadow right in the middle of the room.

They try to build a new film aesthetics here on the ruins of smart mass cinema. The plot is based on a formula of pretentious horror films - such as “sixth feeling”, “limb” and “others”. As the places of power, completely worn out monuments of cinematic architecture - a dam, an underground transition, who came from the Alpine wilderness of the American diner, was chosen.

The heroes say the interiors of their apartments: Michelangelo Antonioni posters on the walls, flirty book blockages, noble poverty, pleasant music pouring from old players. The actors are deprived of the Hollywood gloss and therefore seem to be real people. (The original Sundance show, by the way, has to solve this problem. Rectify is played by the written beauty Ebigail Spencer, and in the upcoming criminal series “The Red Road” will be involved in Khal Drogo from the “Game of Thrones”. But the director will be performed by James Gray, the author of Little Odessa, Yard, “Yard”, “Yard”, “Yard”, “Yard”, “ “The masters of the night” and “lovers”, the grandson of emigrants from Russia and the main special in Hollywood by the Slavic Mafia.)

While the cinema was chasing the technical 3D, 3D narrative and sensual appeared on television.

Unlike the American tradition of literary integrity in the history of "Les Revenants" is full of holes that you want to darn. And even reduce everything at all. The viewer here is taken to active accomplices from the first minutes. Admiring the idea, he begins to condescendingly bring her to mind. I wouldn’t all return to the dead together, but one at a time, so that they were waiting for them to be waiting for a soldier from the front in the novel “Brothers and Sisters” by Fedor Abramov. I wish the school bus turned over not at the very beginning, but at the end of the first season, so that we can look at the life of these families before the disaster. What could be a slogan: "In the end, all these children will die." I wish the heroes spent the second season in sorrow. I wish the walking dead appeared only in the third.

For a long time, the standard of a high -quality series was considered a show that you can not watch, but listen, doing household chores. Even the most powerful HBO dramas fit into this rule, but it does not work with the Sundance repertoire. These series must be contemplated. And, as it turns out, the senses allow you to describe complex topics that are not subject to texts. In the case of Les Revenants, this is sorrow through the departed and confusion from their constant return. Television has repeatedly worked out this plot - in the intellectual show “The Client is always Dead” by HBO , and in the hooligan “American Horror History” of the FX channel. “Les Revenants” puts his predecessors on both shoulder blades.

In this regard, it is scary to know what eternal topic the Sundance Channel will decide to close the next time.