Non-brutal "Brutus"

On October 17, it became known that Konstantin Fam's short film "Brut" was on the Oscar long list - an intermediate stage between the application and the nomination.

"Brut" is the second film from the conceived series about the Holocaust "Witnesses" directed by Konstantin Fam - the first was "Shoes", the third will be "Violin".

Four years ago, the movie "Shoes" was extremely popular - it was watched online, downloaded, shared, admired the novelty of the form, cried. The short film about the fate of a pair of red shoes that belonged to a Jewish woman, who went through the nightmare of the Holocaust with her and ended up in a pile of shoes taken from concentration camp prisoners before being sent to the gas chamber, was indeed touching and unusual. Therefore, the next film from the cycle "Witnesses" - "Brut", based on the story of the famous Czech writer Ludvik Ashkenazy, was awaited with tenderness and deliberate approval.

Brutus is a dog, a German Shepherd. On the eve of the war, the musician Leo (Vladimir Koshevoy) will give a puppy to his beloved Rosanna (Oksana Fandera). Brutus will become a lonely Rosanna friend, companion, the only member of the family. He will go with her to a concentration camp, where he will be with the German officer Horst (Philip Jankowski), who will try to make a real Nazi beast out of an affectionate dog, for which he will pay dearly.

If “Shoes” told the story of a world tragedy in a few minutes without a single word, without a single actor’s “intervention”, using only a pair of red shoes that turned from a symbol of joy into a sign of trouble, then “Brut” is already a banal evil fairy tale. Although the authors promise in the description of the film that the Holocaust is shown through the eyes of a dog, the authors keep their promise only once, when we see Rosanna's face through the eyes of a puppy given to her.

We know that Nazi officers, and even in the service of a concentration camp, are the dregs of society. There is no need to show and prove this once again with the help of cinema art. And yes, we know that war, the camp, the Holocaust are beyond human understanding. Simply repeating this once again, of course, is possible and even necessary, but again - without pronouncing well-known truths to the point of exhaustion.

Mankind is spoiled by art, and art is spoiled by man. They have been together for a long time, they already want something more refined from each other than rock art. Starting with the fixation of reality, cinematography has long since comprehended the science of imagery and said goodbye to didactics. It is necessary to shoot about the Holocaust, and it will always be necessary, people will not give up attempts to reflect on this terrible page of their history for many years, or even centuries. But cinema does not stand still, and it requires new forms, new readings. There's nothing you can do - evolution.

This year's film Son of Saul by Hungarian Laszlo Nemes won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In it, the tragedy of the Holocaust is shown as if on a tangent, all the horror is concentrated somewhere on the periphery of the protagonist's vision. We do not see any blood or bodies writhing in the gas chamber - we only observe the daily work of the concentration camp Sonderkommando. In this everyday life - the universal concentration of horror and the denial of the existence of God's hand. In "Brutus" there is blood, death, a feisty Nazi (who, as expected, is also a gentle husband and an enthusiastic father - how else?!), pursuit, the injustice of life and the unreasonableness of death. But the authors didn’t seem to get their hands on cinema as such - not a single image (as it was in “Shoes”), not a single riddle, not a single surprise. Everything is correct, smooth and known in advance. And that's why it's incredibly boring. (By the way, Ashkenazi's story, based on which the film was made, is written on behalf of a dog, and it is infinitely tender, tragic, full of deep sadness).

American film academics are, of course, sentimental and politically correct, which is probably why Brutus made it to the Oscars long list. But cinema is likely to be distinguished from a didactic manual of kindness.