July rain

Today in Moscow , the Finland Cinema Festival begins. Yukho Kuosmanen’s film “The Happy Day in the Life of Ollie Cats”, shot by 16 mm, is opened by the history of the preparation of the Finnish Boxer-Leguez for the match for the title of world champion in 1962 (the picture received the main prize in the Cannes “special look”). Vasily Koretsky - about why the Kuosmanen film (on April 12 he will be released in Russian rental) is more than stylization and better than a sports drama.

Light spots of cloaks at dusk, rain, cottages. The summer night is reflected in the surface of the lake. Light movement of the summer wind in the dark mass of foliage. Forest, forest again, farewell on the night highway. Wet July is replaced by cold August. Crowds in the stadium, faces and hands whiten in dark -clipped dark -closed darkness. The camera goes to the side, under the ropes, straightens, trembles again, catching the confused face of a small boxer. This is the main character of the film, Ollie the Cyaks, the real character of the Finnish sports story - now in this ring he will be sent to a knockdown three times, and the main match in his career will stop 15 minutes after the beginning.

However, in the Yuho Kuosmanen film, the professional career of the “bakery” is given, as it were, reluctantly, “through, I can’t”, like an annoying obstacle that interferes with the development of the main plot. Yes, so it is - Ollie is reluctant to fight from the film. He is in love with Rayya’s neighbor and dreams of finishing all the same, with which the movie about him begins, is a large rural wedding. But the inexorable logic of the serious city world, more similar, however, on an absurdity of circumstances, makes Ollie fight for the title of world champion with a visiting American. For Ollie, this is the first big match, the first time in professional sports. A new role presses him like that new costume that is forced to wear for advertising shooting with some kind of alien beauty. A small, stooping, sneaky look at the ring clinging around it from serious, business people ... Once they did not let go of the championship in Italy because of membership in the Communist Party, now he has to hung up with well-fed old people and pose in front of stupid cameras of documentaries, turning it into a pop star of a national scale.

All sorts of enthusiastic nonsense will certainly tell you about “Olli Cumbles”, and the film really provokes the film. Monochrome, 16 mm, cars and costumes of a model of 1962, and even boxing with the rain-and pulls the Soviet thaw, or even early visconti here. Do not believe. If the film is Cuosmanen and looks like something thaw, then perhaps to Shpalikov with his quiet tragedy of everyday life. And, of course, this is more “Rocky” than “Rocco and his brothers”-but in a quiet Finnish performance, the weighty bricks of the Hollywood scheme turn into a gentle and restrained village prose, which is completely no longer abused by brigies-evidence, nor a bird's homon (although all this can be found in the Finnish landscape, so dear to the main heart of the main one. hero). In general, “Ollie the Cleaks” is a very special movie that is not very trying to be like senior comrades and more preoccupied with the experiences of his hero. Yes, 16 mm in the world, numbers are, as it were, a prohibited technique, nostalgia is guaranteed here only grain of film. But what else, except for this small format, to convey the atmosphere of a small, very small homeland, and a birch, and a forest, and a girl in a dress from a sittz - all the simple things that the baby Ollie runs dried in Helsinki for training? In one of the episodes, Ollie and his girlfriend are guest in a spacious forest estate; It soon turns out that the hostess receiving them is only a guest in this house forgotten by the real owners. At this moment, it seems that the film crew is also visiting, on the rights of poor relatives came to take a cottage; And what could be more surprising than this merging of the image and the depicting? The film is full of small, but precisely acting details, constantly emphasizing the inappropriate sentimentality of the hero from which everyone around is trying to make a combat vehicle. Here Ollie buys a stupid bouquet (from a friend), in order to meet the American guest as it should, he notes the quality of bread in a leopard restaurant-the only thing he can evaluate (in the main profession the cumbers was a baker, his name was-Ollie-Bolschik), then he was awkwardly silent next to people from high society, he is awkwardly posing in the photographer, uncomfortably tossing in a narrow blood (nights The champion is in his children's coach, there was no longer enough sponsorship of sponsorship), inappropriately runs to his native town for the weekend. Sports drama gradually turns into a provincial elegy, into the history of the return of a village guy from the city adventure. Large sport is harmful. And at home it is better.