I was looking for a person and always found

Anton Dolin - memory of director George Danelia

Director George Danelia, a classic of domestic cinema, author of the paintings “Mimino”, “Afonya”, “Autumn Marathon”, “Kin-Dza-DZA” died in Moscow. He was 88 years old. The director, more precisely, reflected the four decades of our history, recalls film critic Anton Dolin.

What George Danelia had no competitors is in the audience love. Critics, housewives, intellectuals, proletarians, adults and children adored his paintings (he shot a lot about them, including his brilliant joint debut with Igor Talankin, “Seryozha”), and the same Soviet engineers, about whom he spoke with special warmth. Even the authorities complained of them, and it was hardly the reason for his allegedly apoliticality. It was just in Danelia itself, as in his films, there was something disarming. What? Answering this question, you will inevitably go down to the general words: “kindness”, “optimism”, “light”. Of course, they explain as little and inaccurately as professional characteristics.

Yes, the best scriptwriters worked with him, many of them are not only cinema people: Rezo Gabriadze, Victoria Tokareva, Alexander Volodin. Yes, his paintings were shot by amazing Vadim Yusov, Anatoly Petritsky, Pavel Lebyshev. Yes, not only his favorites played their undeniably best roles - Evgeny Leonov and Vakhtang Kikabidze, but also Oleg Basilashvili, Leonid Kuravlev. He discovered for the cinema of actors Nikita Mikhalkov, Roman Madyanov and many others. And you can write a dissertation about music in Danelia’s films, yes, perhaps, not one. The classics of the twentieth century Boris Tchaikovsky in Seryozha and Moses Weinberg in Athos created penetrating scores, Andrei Petrov and Guy Kancheli - they “divided” the majority of Danelia's paintings among themselves - formed a whole musical universe. Songs from Danelievsky cinema-“I am walking around Moscow”, “Chito-Gvrito”, “Mom, mom, what I will do”-went to the people, like numerous winged phrases, and “on the river, on the river, on that berezhochka ...” became Leonov’s visiting card, who performed her for the first time in Danelia's half-forbidden “thirty-three” comedy.

Of course, in it, as a director, there was an amazing and rare musicality. He led the plot as a melody, knew how to add a film from several leitmotifs (such is the fragmentary “I am walking around Moscow”, born from the only episode invented by the screenwriter Gennady Shpalikov), impeccably held the rhythm, owning the art of pause no worse than the art of climax. But there is nothing to explain to this.

Danelia was an absolute author: no matter what brilliant writers he worked in co -authorship, his style and language were always identified. Even when he suddenly moved from realism to Cur, from comedy to drama, from everyday life to a fairy tale. But, making the author’s cinema, marked on many festivals (his creative path began with the victory in Karlovy Vary), Danelia never ceased to be a popular favorite. In this, he was similar to Fellini in his early, best period. If something crushed Danelia after the fall of the USSR, it is the destruction of the rental system. He could not understand how his new works were wonderful, pure, childishly naive and brilliantly transparent “nastya”, “eagle and tails”, “fortune”-do not find the mass viewer to whom he was used to.

Over time, Danelia was not able to believe in his discrepancy. And perhaps he was right. In “Nastya” and “Fortune”, with all the melancholic lightweight, there are echoes of an inaudible requiem for a dream, so accurately reflecting the mood of the 1990s. “Passport” (1990), a kind of variation on the themes of the masterpiece “Mimino”, is the most accurate fixation of the turning point: the end of the dilapidated USSR, dawn of the new Russia. “Kin-dza-dza” (1986), brilliant insight of perestroika cyberpunk, caustic fantastic anti-utopia about a world in which space travels are combined with poverty, slavery and cult of multi-colored pants,-the best artistic afterword to the Soviet project.

The stagnant 1970s are flawlessly formulated in the non-cocked trilogy of the tragicomedies: “Afonya” (1975) about loneliness, love and the search for human dignity, “Mimino” (1977) about escapism and patriotism, “Autumn marathon” (1979) about compromise and running in place. And “I am walking around Moscow” (1963) with his slight breathing, “thirty -three” (1965) with the touching fantasies of a little man and the programmatic “Do not grieve!” (1968)-the manifesto of freedom and non-systemicity-all the 1960s accommodated. Incredibly, but the fact: for four decades of our modern history, there was no artist more accurate, merciless and at the same time merciful. No wonder Danelia, along with Volodin, was the first to formulate the “Handsome problem” in the “Autumn Marathon” - and the first to mock her gently.

The ironic, patient, gentle, completely devoid of arrogance, never learned anyone, he, of course, was not hidden-a big artist is always fearless-but he skillfully hid behind his heroes, the range of which was unthinkably wide (from a drunkard to a university teacher, from a metro-building to the captain of the dry truck). His main topic was the search for human in each, no matter how chalk and funny. Danelia, like a kinnik diogen, was looking for a man with fire in the afternoon. And he always found: even when the hopes seemed to be not left, even when “tears dripped”, even when the next nonsense, the Chekhov term was appropriate here - he was “completely missing”.

Anton Dolin