Viktor Sukhorukov played the messiah who came to the city of sins / KINOPOISK.RU

Under the blue sky there is a city called Orleans. No, not in France, but in the Russian hinterland, which slightly resembles hell. There are a lot of flies there (almost like in "Cargo 200"), poor people live there, leading a dreary life. For example, a vulgar hairdresser (Elena Lyadova) habitually performs abortion after abortion, thus ruining an entire kindergarten; but for her it's like brushing her teeth. The surgeon who performs these abortions (Oleg Yagodin) constantly runs after women and does not quite understand why he lives - to make children and personally kill them?..

One day, a man calling himself the Executor (Viktor Sukhorukov) arrives in this city. It is quite obvious that the sweet-voiced madman does not belong to this world: either he is a demon, or, on the contrary, an angel. The local investigator (Vitaly Khaev) does not at all exclude the possibility that he is the messiah (and the ancient Hebrew word "Mashiach" sounds more than clearly in the film). The Executor wanders around Orleans and reminds the residents of their sins - which the residents really don't like.

Lilies-immoralists

The songs for the film were written by the British band The Tiger Lillies, who had previously collaborated with Sergei Bodrov Sr. on the film Let's Do It Quickly. As a result, a small scandal occurred: the musicians did not like the film and tried to recall the songs they had already written. The reason was ideological inconsistencies: The Tiger Lillies are passionate about immorality and the fight against religion (Arabov said that for them, "sin is a field of freedom, but for me, it is a field of unfreedom"). In the end, the songs were included in the film, but at the end, a caption appeared that said, "The moral position of the authors of the film does not coincide with the position of The Tiger Lillies."

It is hard to imagine a film that would differ more in style from the previous joint work of director Andrei Proshkin and screenwriter Yuri Arabov – “The Horde”. A strict historical drama about the price that must be paid for a miracle, at first glance has nothing in common with the absurdist black comedy that is “Orleans”; it is hard to do without mentioning Bulgakov, and indeed, the thought of Woland immediately comes to mind when you get acquainted with the plot (later, a huge cat will also flash in the film). However, if you scrape off the phantasmagoric wrapper from “Orleans”, it becomes clear that the work before us is even more moralistic and in any case much more frontal in its moralism than “The Horde”: this is a film about the everyday sin for which you will inevitably have to pay, and Sukhorukov’s hero is neither an angel nor a demon, but the embodiment of Conscience – inconvenient, absurd and seemingly unnecessary. However, it is very difficult to live in this world without her.

The problem with Orleans is that Proshkin is not very good at phantasmagoria and the analogies with Bulgakov do not work in his favor. Orleans lacks lightness and virtuosity, it looks like a rather strained and cumbersome film, just like the “human” name of Sukhorukov’s hero – and he introduces himself as Pavlyuchik A. Pavlyuchik. It seems that he received this name thanks to film critic Leonid Pavlyuchik, but the big question is whether the viewer really needs this dubious intra-cinematic joke.

Proshkin is, of course, a good director, but he still breathes much easier in the space of realistic cinema (be it Spartak and Kalashnikov, Minnesota or The Soldier's Decameron). The actors correct the situation as best they can; if The Horde was largely based on the talent of Maxim Sukhanov, Roza Khairullina and Andrei Panin, then Orleans is based primarily on the work of Elena Lyadova (whom this film finally made the brightest young film actress in the country) and the excellent Yekaterinburg theater actor Oleg Yagodin (for some incomprehensible reason, cinema discovered him only this year - in addition to Orleans, Alexei Fedorchenko's Angels of the Revolution is due to be released). But even they, it seems, do not always feel confident in those farcical, trashy settings where Proshkin unfolds the action of a simple, old-fashioned morality play.

The author is a special correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda

Andrey Proshkin's film "Orleans" is released