Water in a bag without a bottom

Two fairy tales for adults composed by real artists are released

January-February-the golden time of the film distribution, the peak of interest in the cinema. Not only films participating in the Oscar marathon are released on the screens. At this time, in the repertoire you can find rather rare genres, even for Artkino.

Sweet and gloomy

“Form of Water” is a mix of fairy tales and retro -detective, the composition of Guillermo del Toro, an experienced creator of irreal reality (“Labyrinth Favna”, “The Devil Range”). The end of the fifties is the confrontation of the West and the East. Special services are brought to the secret center of the water monster, which was caught in the Amazon, in order to send it into space and catch up with the USSR (the Russians have already sent dogs into space!). But here's the bad luck: not a young, ugly cleaning lady Eliza (beautiful Sally Hawkins) fell in love with a greenish scaly amphibian. And amphibia could not (could?) Do not reciprocate.

Del Toro in the style of an old comic book and old cinema restores the era of industrial design, the atmosphere of the Cold War, promising alarming changes. He composes the universe like ours, but suspiciously brushes to the Hollywood musicals of the 40s. Eliza - purely Cinderella - washes, removes, tries. And ordinary cleaners work on secret facilities. In addition, she is dumb. But no, the heroine Sally Hawkins is not just a unheard of she - a newcomer from silent cinema. A carrier of another culture, so each gesture is a speaker. It is no coincidence that the heroine of the film lives in a closet above the cinema. Cinderella turns into a cinema princess when, with poetic gestures, she explains that she and the monster are similar: lonely, outcasts, not understood and not accepted by the hostile world. The personification of the cynical world in the "form of water" is not the favorite del Toro "nonhumans"-fascists and not even muddy agents of Kay-Ji, among which there is a certain Mikhalkov ... And a sophisticated chauvinist with a square jaw played by Michael Shanno. He is a representative of an alarming future, in which there will be no place for “others”, “inferior”, “ichtyanders”. He does not notice “invisible” people like cleaners, he is power, straightens out with “freaks” - amphibians. What can be opposed to this onslaught of power? Only the love, which, as the message to the Corinthians says, "will be longed out, merciful ... It is reached by the truth." Love sees the essential. Love is a synonym for water, it fills itself, takes any form. Eliza brings to water supply to the water - boiled eggs. It teaches a monster with a knife and a fork, puts your favorite records - with Carmen Miranda, for example. Eliza herself learns to dance under the hit of the forties “You will never know how I miss you” from the old film “Hello, Frisco, Hello!”. Through the forbidden love, she learns to realize herself, to understand, to be.

This is the most ingenuous, naive story in the filmography of the famous author of the exquisite Gothic horror. A fairy tale seasoned with syrup, naturalism and author's soundtrack Alexander Despla. In places excessively sentimental, predictable. Sending us to the "Beauty and the Beast", "King Kong", "Monster from the Black Lagoon" and even "Mermaid". But the visual row with a sustained palette from emerald to black - turning the film into a session of magic. Like the film "Artist" is a dedication to the old cinema, in which in the largest plan there were no rides, but feelings. Exaggerated, non -shy sentimentality. Dressed not in words - in gestures, a wave of eyelashes. And thanks to the imagination of not only authors, but also the audience, the dumb actresses found their voice ... Just like Eliza in the excellent performance of Sally Hawkins. The film was awarded the main prize of the Venice Film Festival, and Guillermo Del Toro received the Golden Globe as the best director.

Incorrect joy

Khamdamov had been waiting for the full -length film for more than ten years. It is called the "genius of uninhabited films." The aroused professionals and immediately forbidden short filming “My Heart” in the mountains, the killed “unexpected joys” (the incomplete negative was destroyed on the orders of the leadership of Mosfilm, only fragments were preserved). The miserable “Anna Karamazoff” arrested by the French producer with Jeannan Moro. The renom of the "damned poet" haunts, turning into essence.

“A bag without a bottom” , like all Khamdam cinema, cannot be evaluated from the point of view of “genres”, “plots”. In it, “accuracy with shame”, air laughter - with mental numbness, chaos with filigree discharge, artlessness with mysticism. He himself described the best work of the director himself: definitely a “bag without a bottom”. Or the self -portrait of Rustam Khamdamov, who has been making his endless magical film for half a century.

The picture is a variation on the motives of the novels of Ryunoske Akutagawa “in the more one” (Kurosava took “Rasomon” for this plot). Khamdamova attracted the plurality of points of view on what is happening. The samurai turned into a Russian prince. The robber will lure him with the princess into the thicket. Further, every hero will tell his version of the tragedy. But Hamdamov will hide the magical plot into the casket of another story. Will wrap at another time. In imperial Russia during the time of Alexander the Second. An experienced reverence (Svetlana Nemolyaeva) was invited to the palace to read to the Grand Duke (Sergey Koltakov) a medieval fairy tale about the mystical murder of the prince in the forest.

It all starts in the palace hall with chairs covered with white covers, like pale memories of the easting past with candlelight balls. The whole film is an attempt to reincarnate this without a trace that had gone into the waters of oblivion of the world.

The prince, who recently buried his wife, grieves, secretly drinking grief with strong drinks. Here the story of ancient bottles hidden in the library arises (the bottles are inspired by the still life of Georgio Morandi). The storyteller reveals them with the help of a “all -seeing” paper nose and exposes their “fate”. Three dusty, tired of life, matte glass "virgins", who did not choose in Moscow, which they so dreamed of in his youth. And the dark bottle is stronger - Katerina, decisively frozen over the cliff. Dreams fill the vessels of the stunted reality.

An reverence, stuck in a black dress, appears the hearing of the prince not even by the story itself, but the magic of what is happening before us personally (sometimes as in a dumb cinema - without sound). In the Berende Forest, the Vasnetsovsky prince with the princess with a princes in an expensive Khamdam decree rush in unknown paths, a magic mirror, tied to the prince’s tree, pierces the arrow, like St. Sebastian, sparkles. And above the surface of the lake Bilibinsky - the head of the robber on which the sword will make sure, and the water itself will build the symmetry of the uncontrollable forerunner of the crime. Here, people-Grib with straw satchels find a treasure and do not know what to do with it. And Baba Yaga (unrecognizable Alla Demidova) conjures and directs the action.

The Fairy tale is strictly indicated by the maid of honor Anna Mikhalkova: no more than two murders! So she leads her branching story on the edge of life, truth and fiction, not forgetting the main question: is there a paradise? And he finds the answer where to be paradise: in childhood we are immortal.

But there is no death in the fairy tale. It has live water or, like Khamdamov, continuous changes in fate and reincarnation. “A bag without a bottom”, which Freilina Nemolyaeva speaks of, is a fairy tale number 295, her Shekherzada told Shakhrian. Whoever pierces more words in the bag will win the dispute. The storyteller will speak to the dead: put in a bag and Samarkand, and Day of Judgment, and lemon. No matter how much the prince loves fiction and everything is wonderful, especially mushrooms, even kisses their sucking, and will lose their fairytale. But comforted. Because a terrible fairy tale has a therapeutic effect. But it is unlikely that a fairy tale will cure reality. "Why do these young people throw bags of gunpowder with kings with kings?" - The revere girl, similar to a bird, asks us. This is a movie about the fragility of human life. About the fragility of art itself, today almost unclaimed.

Svetlana Nemolyaeva told me how they selected a costume for her reading. Terribly pulled a corset. We put on many old lower skirts for crinolines. They found somewhere a dress that a place in the museum. And even the underbuilding of the batistal and stockings are genuine, from the nineteenth century. Old, like time itself. You ask why all this? Who will see it? For this, Pinocchio is needed by the nose of the reading, with the help of which you can consider magic.

“A bag without a bottom” is a jewelry work, it is not for nothing that its working names were “rubies” or “Yakhonta” (but who remembers today about the Yakhonta). Although it seems that all the precious stones in the artist’s films are only a reflection of overflows of a heavenly children's kaleidoscope.