I have my mother instead of a mop

David O. Russell removed another “fighter”, but this time in the female version. “Joy” is also a film in the genre of success history, but not in boxing, but in business. And so - the heroine Jennifer Lawrence has almost the same zero starting position that Christian Bale had. And a very large dysfunctional family - at the same time support and encumbrance. The family consists of an elderly grandmother, on behalf of which a narrative is being conducted, a mother who is sitting in her room all day at a full parade and watching soap operas, two children and an ex -husband living in the basement. All of them and the mortgage Joy (Lawrence) pulls on himself. Joy also has a father (de niro), also diluted with his mother; Another girlfriend at the beginning of the film gives him back to the family - as a defective product; He is also going to live in the basement. This whole family itself is like a soap opera. And in the nightmare, which is dreaming of Joy, they really find themselves inside the television, in a parallel universe, almost like Celine and Julie at Retett.

Joy's father has his own car service, but, like the mother of the protagonist in the “fighter”, he relies on the wrong daughter. Peggy’s sister is engaged in business, and Joy is not allowed to him. As a child, she dreamed of being an inventor, although it is said loudly-in English for people like her, there is a good word Tinker : the one who is busy with ready-made things, adjusting something to them. Usually these are men, and they do this in their garages and basements. But Joy was supplanted even from the basement. When Joy was small, she cut out a magical world out of paper: it had a green meadow, and on it was a gray wolf and a castle with a prince and a princess. But the prince was not saved from the wolf - she did not claim to be a prince - and the house that Joy will build for himself and where the great inventions will come up with.

The main of them is the self-drawn-in “miracle-cheat”. Joy invents an assistant , that is, what is already there. The assistant for centuries satisfies our needs, so to speak, in his basic configuration. Mops exist in the same way as wheels or dishes. The innovation created by Joy is one of those that are traded in the electric trains: not just a screwdriver, but a screwdriver with a magnet attracting nuts, not just matches, but waterproof matches with which you can safely fall into the water on fishing. It seems to be damn comfortable things, but as if doubtful. Fricigs among other goods. If you have to walk and get into them like that, is this additional level of convenience that it was built into the Tinkerer thing is really needed? Or is it just wiring? Joy, too, has to inhale your miracle spectrum. Graving her daughter, she makes a demonstration of her invention in the parking lot near the supermarket, until the police are expelled with shame from the parking lot. But the heroine is still lucky: she gets access to a more adequate method of spread-telemarketing, and even at the very moment of its origin. Joy meets a business guru (Bradley Cooper), he leads her for the curtains of the “store on the couch”, gives her a chance, then another, and Joy finally achieves the first serious success. Now she flips the mop of a wide television audience, standing in front of the camera herself.

Russell's new film is a kind of experience in media -archeology by hopelessly outdated television, where soap operas are looped, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the stylistic of telemarketing with well -groomed ladies in fitted costumes and with lush hairstyles offering necklaces or evening dresses, in which it is not embarrassing to appear in the same soap operas. But Joy does not turn from a lust into a beautiful princess with a permanent. More precisely, there is an attempt to such a transformation, but it deliberately breaks down. Here the heroine should leave the dressing room of television at all its glory, in a suit and with styling, and the viewer, along with Bradley with a merchant, freezes in anticipation - but instead Joy again appears in trousers, a black bottom - a white top, and all with the same hairstyle “I have my mother instead of a mop” on her head. She skims on the rules and appears in front of the camera as it is - a worn housewife, which is paralyzed by the blinding light of studio spotlights. But the more reliable and convincing its advertising pitch .

In every story of success, the heroine is supposed to either encounter a “family or career” dilemma and, having sacrificed a family and personal life, get a success with a taste of bitterness, or, conversely, success should solve her personal problems and bring to a new, previously inaccessible level of female happiness. Neither one nor the other happens in Russell’s film. Joy does not sacrifice anything and continues to pull the whole family in full force. But she does not acquire anything. The ex -husband remains her best friend, but does not become a husband again, as, for example, in the classic of the Mildred Pierce genre. Joy does not lose the child, although in the film there is a scene where the family tells her that the child is sick and the doctor cannot be called because the phone is disconnected for debts. She does not meet in her path a gigolo-aristocrat-only crooking suppliers from California and a picturesque fraudster with a fake patent from Dallas. And, most importantly, she does not start a novel with the hero of Cooper, when it seems that this move begs by itself. A spark is clearly running between them, but this is a spark of business partnerships of people, so sincerely passionate about their work that there is something mocking in this.

The main strangeness of “Joy” is really a film about how to invent and promote a self-drawn mop, and he persistently refuses to be something else that we begin to suspect that he is something else. Perhaps viral goods invented by the heroine are an analogue of psychological idiosyncrazia and ticks, about which Russell had previously shot his films. There is something in common between them-both are alarming fans of the basic configuration.