Bad wagging

Fifty -year -old Natasha lives with an old woman and a cat Barsik, works in a zoo, is responsible for the purchase of feed. In her free time from her mother and feed, Natasha goes to the seashore to look at the horizon. Colleagues, beast-like aunts, tease over her and hold on an idiot, but in the world of Natasha there is something worse than colleagues, something that she does not talk to anyone about. This is her tail.

He grows up in one night and decisively changes the life of not only the heroine, but the entire seaside town. Among the townsfolk, rumors creep no less than about the phenomenon of the devil. Doctors, unable to think of the incredible in the usual natural science categories, try to pretend that there is no extraordinary phenomenon at all, and again and again they send the patient on an X -ray. And for a reason: Natasha quickly converges with a young perversive radiologist, turns in front of him with her phallic naked tail, depicts a cat and generally gets younger in her eyes and even completely changes his wardrobe, gait and hairstyle. The tail turns the life of the former old Virgo into a series of gags, quite quickly bringing the “zoology” beyond the framework of social criticism, into the field of purely black comedy; In places, the film is even approaching completely trier's transcendence, which ill -wishers can call Kitsch.

Supporters of “good taste” generally do not like Tverdovsky, and they can be understood-from a certain point of view, he looked like a pretense, a counterfeiter who falsify a fashionable hyperrealistic trend of the 2000s. But now 2016, and in Russia, all this realism, the “new wave”, has crawled out according to the great institutional projects dedicated to the literal embodiment of the Mosfilm = Hollywood formula. The Khomeriki shoots about icebreakers, Bakuradze produces a movie about the space station, Khlebnikov went to television and Podakshn, Germanicus began to compose fairy tales. They are replaced by young careerists of a plastic television format, making a movie like a pilot of the series. In such a situation, Tverdovsky already seems to be a nurse of the forest, a scavenger, joyfully gnawing the corpse of Russian realism and providing him with a glorious end.

The camera of his permanent operator Micheladze regularly trembles and trembles, and the heroes still suffer from the cruelty of the world, likened to one continuous correctional institution. But, despite all these manual chambers and social fuses of plots, Tverdovsky was never a real realist - but has always been an ideal stylizer. His first noticeable short film, mocking about merciless Russian sex “As if waiting for a bus”, even participated in real documentary festivals - “Artdokfest”, the documentary section of the MMKF, “Flying”. The next festival film of Solidovsky, Snow (quasi-posting about a provincial teacher buying a heroin for his teenage daughter), even more convincing in his documentary aesthetics, was honestly declared game: it was already impossible to hide participation in the film of a recognizable actress Natalya Pavlenkova. Since then, Pavlenkova has become his permanent actress; The obvious and convincing sacrifice of her heroines is the most important instrument with the help of which Tverdovsky deftly turns the cinema into an anatomical theater. But on the cold table, he does not have the body of Russian life, but the cadaurus of Russian film culture, with which the director does a very important work. With his own hands, he creates that inevitable, which ideally should happen to every school and a wave in the movie in itself. “Zoology” is a grotesque strengthening of all aesthetic and formal foundations, finally closing the topic that does not allow the style to go even into circulation, into commercial space.

The “new quiet” reflected heavily about the elusiveness of the Russian texture, struck into the cake, trying to grab reality by the tail, and Tverdovsky simply creates this tail with the help of robotics and draws more and more nightmares to it, dumps all the most sensitive paths and motives that existed in Russian cinema for the last 10 years. The series "School" and other horrors of Russian institutions? He turns the zoosad into an evil institution, the innocent, by the way, the institution, and crushes everything for fidelity to the macabra of Russian healthcare. Sex, alienation, discus? Here you have such a cocktail from the "pianist" and Trier with Kronenberg that the "fairy tale about the darkness" seems to be an innocent Romkom. Church? There is also, for eating wildness, organized in the room of some former prodmag with a panel high-rise building. No one is forgotten - neither aging Russian women with pork snouts, nor comic doctors, nor priests, nor lions, nor llama, nor monkeys. There are also exorcism, pop hits of the 2000s, the funeral of the cat and the movie generation from concrete mountains in galvanized troughs.

Nevertheless, this completely Gogol world is more like reality than a slow contemplative movie or a ragged report on how it is on a waste time. All these mimetic practices of close peeping into the world give only sliding along the surface of things. “Zoology”, albeit as a result of a wonderful, almost random scenario find, tells us the formula for the structure of the human universe in general - and not only gloomy Russian society. According to this scheme, everything is based on a dark foundation fused from incomprehensible horror and frightening obscenity. Culture and ideology do not see this gloomy monolith in the view of the society about itself and its harmonious story about the world order there are no words to describe this terrible, outrageous basis (although these words, of course, exist in the language: “violence”, “power”, “exploitation”, “sex”, “death” or now, for example, “tail”).

All these years, Russian cinema has tried to write this story, to make an exact vocabular of our time. Tverdovsky, in general, does not give a damn about the accuracy of the terms (his scenarios do not even contain dialogues, for example). He is not a naturalist, but an artist, and therefore he simply turns the leaf and draws there [phallus]. Alas, the sketch remained unfinished, the conflict between the tail and culture free from the restrictions of the formal life -like life of the formal life -like life ends not only with the amazing self -cocked - so it is also carried out behind the scenes. Even the form of a 10-episode romcom on the first seems to be a more prosperous fate for such a plot than a suddenly coming bashful silence.