"Kinotavr" continues

Movie premiere

In "White White Night" director Ramil Salakhutdinov is guided by the principle of immersion in the "natural flow of being"
Photo: press service of the Kinotavr festival

At the 25th Open Russian Film Festival (ORKF) taking place in Sochi, three women's films and one men's were shown - we can say that in the main competition, women took revenge for the short discovery: in the feature film, the weaker sex demonstrated a greater presence of logic, albeit female. From Sochi - LIDIA MASLOVA.

The Kinotavr competition program was opened by two films already patented at international festivals - “Nadezhda Combine” by Natalya Meshchaninova and “Another Year” by Oksana Bychkova. The first full-length film of the ORKF "Nadezhda Combine" in a sense rhymes with the first short film "Nearby" by Yana Troyanova - if there it was about love, then here it is about hope, namely the hope of leaving her hometown Norilsk, which the heroine (Daria Savelyeva) lives by. . The main artistic value of the "Combine" lies in the Norilsk flavor, a significant part of which is the habit of its young residents to speak mostly in obscenities. So far, the filmmakers are somewhat at a loss about the need to edit a “low-fat” theatrical version of the film and admit that without the style-forming profanity, which, as the director rightly noted, “contains living energy,” the whole film will take on a fundamentally different look. But on the other hand, this can become a kind of test of director's skill: if we remove the fundamental part of the obscene expression from "Nadezhda Combine", what means to depict the northern character, convey the heroine's instinctive pull away from her hometown and the ambivalent attitude of the characters towards what is both loved and hated Will Norilsk be left with a dry residue?

The restless female character also turns out to be the driving spring in Oksana Bychkova’s arthouse melodrama “Another Year,” filmed at the request of the State Film Fund, which decided to rebrand classic plots for Russian cinema - Bychkov’s film is based on Volodin’s play “Don’t Part With Your Loved Ones,” but the new film (filmed from the script of the same Lyubov Mulmenko and Natalia Meshchaninova, who own the Nadezhda Combine) does not have much in common with the Soviet film of the same name. The most original dramatic device, invented by the girls who rethought Volodin’s play, is that Nadezhda Lumpova’s obstinate heroine can show her true attitude towards her husband (Alexei Filimonov) only when she is slightly inadequate from anesthesia after an operation to remove appendicitis. This technique made it possible to achieve the desired degree of romantic sincerity, but at the same time avoid unnecessary melodramatic pathos, which, however, still appears in the detailed erotic scenes with which Oksana Bychkova generously equipped her picture, trying to show the “natural course of life” - and her counterargument to critics , who reproached her for being too long, looks typically feminine in its emotionality: the film is a living being, dictating its rhythm to the director, which must be obeyed.

However, the first man in the Kinotavrovsky main competition, a representative of the St. Petersburg school of auteur cinema Ramil Salakhutdinov, in his existential detective story “White White Night” shows even less ability to resist the tempo rhythm that his own film imposes on the author. At the press conference, the director complained that he was unable to fulfill his cherished dream - to make a film lasting an hour and twenty minutes: no matter how much he forced himself and tried to be more concise, even the 15-minute cut of his two-hour film turns out to be a distinct feeling for him. that he ruined his entire plan and destroyed its structure. And the idea here is that for the hero (Artem Tsypin), his profession as a private detective turns out to be just an excuse to retire to himself in the colorful scenery of St. Petersburg, from which many characters are also determined to “get out” no less decisively than from snow-covered Norilsk, although in a philosophical sense In a sense, the theme of escape and the desire to escape from the circumstances set by fate, of course, does not come down to the territorial aspect. In visual terms, director Salakhutdinov is guided by approximately the same principle of immersion in the “natural flow of being,” which is felt in the films of Oksana Bychkova and Nadezhda Meshchaninova, and with particular clarity in Vera Kharybina’s film “Ask Me,” composed of monologues from students of her acting course at VGIK. The trick here is that the novice actors pretend to be “real” people talking to the camera about their lives, and in general, up to a certain point, the viewer, depending on the degree of his sophistication, is quite capable of believing that he is dealing with pure documentary filmmaking (although This is the good old “verbatim” with all its pros and cons, when the apparent naturalness and spontaneity at any moment can reveal, if not obvious falsehood, then the seams of the director’s intervention). The theme of the film "Ask Me" was formulated by cinematographer and co-writer Ivan Makarov quite in line with the thematic theme of the first two days of "Kinotavr" - this is a "kaleidoscope of destinies", a collection of stories about people who are striving somewhere in accordance with the proverb about a fish looking for where deeper, but the question of the real effectiveness of this diving to the apparent depth remains open.

Hope is looking for something deeper