Dad Courage

The young, but obviously brilliant Soviet filmmaker lives a real Soviet bohemian life. He leads a fascinating hardware Mosfilm game (if you shoot the conjunctural nonsense today, tomorrow the studio’s bosses will allow you to do something really worthwhile), sleeps with two different women in turn, goes to restaurants and visit friends who are always ready to tell a fresh political joke, and their wives will be fingered, which, they say, guys will be imprisoned. Is this a "thaw" ?

Well, by the way, Todorovsky promised the second season, but did not promise that he would shoot him himself. Let’s watch the new first-channel series “Courage” as the second season “Thaw”-fifteen years have passed, Mosfilm, in general, the same (the continuity is symbolized by Sergey Bondarchuk, and there and there, the main characters found somewhere in the corridors of the studio), and otherwise everything has changed. Instead of Khrushchev - Brezhnev, instead of the four hundred eighth “Moskvich” - “penny”, of course. Instead of the operator, the director, instead of “Girls and the Brigadier”, is an advertising film about the song “Songs”. And instead of the screenwriter who was released from the window, instead of unpleasant secrets about the war, instead of a time of strange hopes and doomed hysterical optimism - yes literally stagnation. Threat, cynicism, deception and complacency are so large-scale that it spills out of its time and reaches the present day when the aged filmmaker in his Baha is lucky for some reason through Finland to Paris, the journalist of the publication, apparently, is “seven days”, dressed in a telly (the chick secretly collects “information”, with stress on her “and a“ cigarette fir-dynicopter ” In the calculation of a fee in the form of a thick pack of money in an envelope).

Todorovsky wanted to sing the youth of his father, Stefanovich wanted to sing himself, and since in the genre of absolutely copyright cinema (director Stefanovich, according to the book of Stefanovich, makes Stefanovich in the role of Stefanovich in the film about Stefanovich), he was difficult to achieve, then he really managed to sing himself. The correspondent of the entertainment magazine, who comes to Stefanovich at the beginning of the first series, asks him about the ex-primeonna wife (they don’t call Pugachev named in the film)-“What is she in love? And in bed? " - And it turns out to be lowered from the stairs, which, presumably, should symbolize the contempt of the author of the series to tabloid journalism. But this scene, taking into account the rest of the content of the “courage”, can be perceived differently-what do you, an idiot, ask Stefanovich about some kind of interesting woman what she’s in bed-you ask about Stefanovich, and since you didn’t ask you, he will answer you in eight episodes that he was still wow, and in general the wilderness in all his manifestations.

The story of the ascent of Alla Pugacheva, told by seven -year -old Stefanovich Heifer on the way to Paris, is sold in the series as something purely sensational and exclusive, although all the exclusive details of Stefanovich were already told in his ceremonial interviews “Komsomolskaya Pravda” and the same “seven days” - yes, he taught Pugachev to dissolve himself about himself Rumors, talk with the audience in the intervals between songs, do not go to official concerts in the Kremlin, sing only songs, the text of which is written in the first person, and “make a small performance from each song”. Probably, this is probably important, without these details, the biography of Pugacheva will be incomplete, but still she certainly does not exhaust them, and some things even in the self-loving presentation of Stefanovich cannot be hidden. The singer appears in the life of the hero to anyone unknown to the novice performer, and only on some kind of first date she asks him if he heard her song “Arlekino”, with which she won the international competition in Bulgaria a few years earlier-this episode of Pugacheva’s biography cannot be circumvented in any way, Pugachev began with “Arlekino”, and it was long before Stefanovich, and this It is impossible not to mention. He mentions, and further the story of the beginner and unknown singer continues. How is this consistent with the success of "Arlekino"? No, and what's the difference-the film is about Stefanovich.

The personal film director Sergei Mikhalkov (Mikhalkov wrote the plays, and he needed a man who would put them in the cinema) once married the popular singer Pugacheva, lived with her for several years and devoted his whole further life to the propaganda of his bright image of this only real Soviet pop star. This person could sympathize - sadly, when the only episode outweighs the rest of his life and when thirty years are devoted only to the memories of that episode - but it is impossible to sympathize with the specific Alexander Stefanovich, because there is nothing more disgusting than smug, which he continues to ooze in the eight episodes on the first channel. Stefanovich and in the best years (“Soul”, “Start first”) turned out to be so-so, but now there is generally some kind of shame.

It is probably worth saying about the promotion of the “courage”, which was so naive that it seems that Stefanovich personally came up with it-only an elderly and purely irrelevant person can do this: from advertising articles about the series, we learned that Stefanovich himself, preparing for filming, lost a plastic surgery, and the actress that played the paparazzi chick, simply I lost weight, and the script was kept in a terrible secret and all the actors gave a signal of non -disclosure, and Stefanovich himself (not joking, they wrote about this in MK!) Should play Bezrukov, but he was unexpectedly appointed the theater artistic director, so Stefanovich had to play himself. In general, the creator of the series overshadowed the intrigue as best he could, but the real (and that rather dead) intrigue, of course, is in another. “Courage” is shown according to the first in the days of the 65th anniversary of Pugacheva, and it looks like a rather unfriendly step in relation to the anniversary-the idea of ​​Pugacheva as a fully designed production project contradicts the Ibugachevsky mythology. Since the golden media is already Pugacheva, almost the last full-fledged informational occasion associated with her, her participation in the dramatic counter-testing of the first and VGTRK-Pugachev in recent years regularly and noisily moves from the channel to the channel, becoming a New Year's face and simply the face of one or the other. This year, on New Year's Eve, Pugachev was just on the first, and the series of Stefanovich could be a sufficient challenge so that she, slamming the door, again switched to Russia, and the magazine “Seven days” devoted a whole cover for such an event. Actually, this is the intrigue - will it be offended or not, will there be a scandal or not? The series has not yet ended, but the intrigue is allowed ahead of schedule. There is nothing to be offended here. This is not a scandalous series about Pugacheva, it is not an alternative and not critical biography. This is just a harmless fun of a focusing pensioner, albeit coincided with time with the anniversary of Pugacheva. “Thaw” for the poor - and the main poor here, of course, is Alexander Stefanovich himself.