Without a prodigy stumbling

If you fantasize-1983, and the Literary Newspaper for some reason needed a review of Sorokin's “norm”. They gave the Samizdat copy to respected criticism, he sits down and writes that the book was definitely failed by the young author, because he did not quite describe the Soviet realities and, in particular, built most of the plot on a false premise, according to which all the citizens of the USSR are obliged to eat a piece of feces daily, because we know that this is not true and that Soviet people do not have such a responsibility, so What, Mr. Sorokin, it is time to admit that you got the most weighty cranberry.

Something like this is reviewed by Daniel’s film Espinos “Number 44” - there, you see, cranberries, a set of Western stereotypes about Russia and Stalinist times; It is enough to say that the whole plot was built on a fictitious Stalinist formula, according to which there are no murders in the Soviet paradise, so state security throughout the film is trying to give out a series of crimes of the maniac for a series of accidents - gutted children are drawn up in protocols as those who have been eaten by wolves, etc.

That is, everyone knows that art is conventionality, but for some reason, when it comes to art made based on Soviet history, everyone forgets about conventionality and an angry Soviet historian wakes up in all, whose mission is to deal with enemy falsifications.

Seriously, try to treat this as a bold metaphor - yes, the formulas “There are no murders” in the paradise ”did not even have to, it was invented by the authors of the film (more precisely, the book source, but we will not delve into the film), but as the metaphor of all Soviet hypocrisy, Soviet attitude to deaths, catastrophes, crimes are very beautiful. “There are no murders in paradise” - such a slogan instead of “proletariat of all countries, connect” could be printed in a hat of any Soviet newspaper, because not a single newspaper was fundamentally led by any chronicle of incidents, and if Chikatilo was operating under Stalin (also, by the way, quite a witty artistic trick, Chikatilo came to Stalin, and Stalin himself would be about Levan) They didn’t say this on the radio and would not have written in the newspapers. That is, an invented plot message with a ban on any recognition of criminal killings in the USSR is the same original and bold artistic move as eating the norm in Sorokin.

If you relate to the performance of Medinsky not as a demarche of an odious official, but as a gesture of the co-author of the work, then “number 44” becomes a kind of a bank of tomato soup (and Medinsky himself-our Soviet Warhol).

Of course, it can be objected to this that Sorokin is the time of “norms” is a radical non -conformist, and here we are dealing with a low genre of commercial cinema, an entertainment thriller, which should not seriously talk about as a work of art. The argument is convincing, but outdated - it was outdated on April 15, when the Russian distributor and the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation announced a consolidated decision not to show this (already translated, duplicated and condemned) film in our country. It is especially worth highlighting the unprecedented both on the topic and the wording of the statement of the Minister of Medinsky - “We have reached this bottom”, “Or we will have our historical and, accordingly, the future self -determination - or we will“ self -define ”us without our participation”, “intelligently, canonically, without adverse stimulating about“ difficult issues of history ”and unpretentious reflexions.” A little later, Medinsky, proving that he was not going to ban this movie literally, promised to post “Number 44” on the website of the Ministry of Culture - also unprecedented.

An incredible hysteria in connection with, in general, an ordinary film in fact became the art geste itself, a work of art in which the film Espinos is only one of the elements. If you relate to the performance of Medinsky not as a demarche of an odious official, but as a gesture of the co-author of the work, then “number 44” becomes a kind of a bank of tomato soup (and Medinsky himself-our Soviet Warhol). Yes, without a scandal, a film would not need anyone, but the scandal took place, and the film therefore has already taken an exclusive place in modern Russian culture.

As of mid-April, “Number 44” is the most perfect episode of the game in which Medinsky for some reason plays with the audience, forcing her to build her system of values ​​regarding the “leviathan”, then regarding the “tangiaser”. "Are you for" Leviathan "or against?" - This question, in a particular formulation, sounding all winter, few people seemed wild, everyone answered seriously. And if instead of “Leviathan” “number 44”?

Arguments "for" are easy to find. The Western cranberries about the USSR are already an independent genre for a long time, without which it is impossible to imagine the relationship of the Russian audience with Hollywood. Just imagine what would happen if the American and so on our cinema in Soviet and Russian plots gave absolute reliability and accuracy at the level of “my friend Ivan Lapshin”: we would not have recognized either the “red heat” or “Rocky-4”, or the last (and all the other) “Anna Karenina”, or much more. It is worth recalling the recent film about the Dyatlov group, in which the 1959 Soviet students were sitting in their favorite bar, drinking moonshine, also cranberries, but there is a nuance: the film was advertised as American, but this did not fully correspond to the truth. Yes, the Americans were the director and actors, but the producer and the film studio (Alexander Rodnyansky and Non-Stop Sprokshn)-Russian, the film was filmed for Russian rental, and Rodnyansky could, of course, follow the reliability of details, but obviously, he did not deliberately do it, otherwise the film would have lost cranberries so beloved by the Russians. "What are your evidence?"

Espinos also have a lot of this: the heroes drink with a toast “on health”, the Chekists, on the one hand, are too carefully monitored by observing protocol norms, and on the other, they calmly kill each other and enemies of the people with shots in the back of the head in the most unexpected rooms and landscapes for such a procedure. The cranberry stamp about “General Gogol” (it is believed that Russian names are not able to invent in Hollywood and often take the names of the classics so that for sure) in the film is reproduced many times-the enemy of the people Anatoly Brodsky is recognized in cooperation with some Anna Ivanovna Akhmatova, and the maniac as a result is the male, Malevicho, dear.

The atmosphere of the late Nestalin Mordor (the word "Mordor" is just from Medinsky, he is dissatisfied with this, but wasn't the USSR in 1953 a Mordor?) Reproduced remarkably. At the time of social camps in the Czech Republic they loved to shoot film skills about knights and princesses (landscapes and architecture have), but it turns out if you shoot a movie about Stalinism in the same areas, it will turn out to be almost more accurately and terribly than on our beloved cinematograms and serialists of Yauzsky Bulvar, - maybe, trees on the streets of Hollywood Moscow is less than in the original, but the trees give the landscape of humanity and therefore harm.

The most intense episodes of the film may even be too complimentary to the Soviet man of those times. The scene with the capture of Brodsky in the house of the peasant Okun seemed to be sketched from the first minutes of “inglorious bastards”: for the creators of “numbers 44”, as if it goes without saying that not guilty Soviet people did not dutifully waited for the MGB at home, and ran away from it on farms, supported by honest peasants, there were few in life, but it’s even nice that the British and the Americans and the Americans and the Americans and the Americans and the Americans and the Americans and the Americans and the American Represent this part of our history that way. The episode of the fight with the “socially close” in the carriage of the cattle, going to the Gulag, is no less worthy-we will not find fault with the fact that for some reason they are being taken together: these wife and husband are fighting too beautifully with criminals, so that, then stunning the escort, to make a successful escape “to a breakthrough”.

What, this could not be in life? Speak directly-this could not be in our cinema about the forties and five, which thousands of kilometers have been shot during the post-Soviet years and from which (it is from it, and not from the stories of eyewitnesses, memoirs, or even more modern cinema events-yeah, from “Spring” and “Kuban Cossacks”) we draw our idea of ​​the late Nestalinsky times. “Number 44” is devoid of historical reliability-this is the nightmare compared to our “Leningrad-46”, or “Liquidation”, or “We are from the Future”. Funny.

Choosing between the beam of the post -Soviet mass cinema and the stamps of the American film comic book, perhaps, it is worth choosing just a comic book - the genre is more old, more respected, more convertible. Another thing is that no one gives us this choice: this kind of films in Hollywood are rare, and, having successfully tested a new form of censorship in agreement with the distributor, Medinsky will not stop and next time it will prohibit something accurately worth it. So “Number 44” - and in this sense, epoch -making cinema.