Kursk has a stellar cast, but even the accomplished Colin Firth (pictured, center) has little room to show his skills / Belga Productions

The Kursk tragedy was comprehended by foreign filmmakers earlier than by Russians. Perhaps, as with Chernobyl, distance plays a role here: these stories are too close to Russians and returning to them is psychologically difficult. So far, only Alexander Mindadze has dared to do this, in 2011 he made a film about the Chernobyl disaster, On Saturday. The domestic mainstream prefers other pages of history: it is much more pleasant to make films about Alexei Leonov or Salyut-7, about victories in basketball and hockey matches. And it is not only that such films are actively supported by the state. It is simply that when it comes to athletes and cosmonauts, any director knows how to please the viewer, but in the case of the Kursk, there is nothing to calm either himself or the people. Even the article about the loss of the submarine in the English-language Wikipedia is three times more detailed and informative than in the Russian one. The thought that the submariners could theoretically have been saved, but they spent many hours underwater and still died, is so hard that Russians, remembering August 2000, seem to instinctively turn away from it. What can we console ourselves with? Make a film about how at least they didn't suffer much before they died?

“There will be no Kate Winslet floating to safety on a torn-off door,” noted a Variety reviewer who saw Kursk last year at the Toronto Film Festival. (Since then, the film has been released in many countries, and judging by its $5 million box office on a $20 million budget, foreign audiences have not been eager to see such a film; Kursk is not doing well in Russia either, coming in seventh place in box office receipts on its opening weekend, bringing in less than $500,000.) But, of course, this story fits perfectly with the idea of Russian gloom, sullenness, and isolation, of bleak Russian landscapes over which mournful Orthodox chants float (music by Alexandre Desplat, lyrics by Natalia Aygi). According to producer Luc Besson, screenwriter Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan) and director Thomas Vinterberg, spirituality – and the church is more or less where Kursk begins and ends – would not hurt a film about Russians; poverty and lack of prospects in life also suit the characters very well.

At the beginning of Kursk, the sailors gather at the altar for a joyful occasion – the wedding of one of their own. In order to pay for the subsequent champagne banquet, Lieutenant Commander Averin (Matthias Schoonaerts) is forced to sell his watch – his salary has been delayed for several months. The Northern Fleet, as they soon notice, is barely functioning at all – vegetables are now being transported on former military ships, “and if the Americans suddenly attack us, we will shoot zucchini and cabbage at them.” Much has already been sold to those same Americans – bathyscaphes lower interested parties to the site of the Titanic disaster for big money. Judging by the dialogues, military exercises in Russia in 2000 are, in principle, ritualistic in nature and are carried out out of habit (although Kursk is still stuffed with some secret technologies, which will play a fatal role in its fate).

Dane Vinterberg, co-founder of the Dogme 95 movement, once became famous for The Triumph and was one of the leaders of European art-house cinema. In 20 years, he worked his way up to director of big-budget studio films, in which the author's style is barely visible. He very effectively, professionally, in Hollywood style, films two underwater explosions on board the Kursk, which immediately kill most of the crew, - and then does not really know how to tell the story. The suffocating submariners desperately try to save themselves, in one of the most intense scenes, Averin swims underwater to the next compartment for oxygen cartridges and gets them, but the viewer knows that the reward will only be a short delay in the inevitable. Averin's pregnant wife (Léa Seydoux) is picking mushrooms on the shore with her son, hears some noise from the sea, does not pay much attention to it, and then becomes worried. The Russians, with the pitiful rescue craft left at their disposal, "which is only used to haul garbage", cannot reach the crew (although, according to the authors of the Kursk, there was enough time for this). The noble British officer David Russell (Colin Firth), who, thanks to super-radars, learned about the disaster before anyone else, offers to help, but Admiral Vladimir Petrenko (Max von Sydow) categorically rejects it. Why? "They are afraid of losing military secrets and they are also afraid of humiliation," Russell sums up gloomily. If there is a moral in the Kursk, it comes down to this: it is better to humiliate yourself, but save human lives, this is more important than prestige and military secrets, and the stern Russians cannot understand this. Certainly they could not in 2000.

The script for Kursk included several scenes with Vladimir Putin, which were later removed to be on the safe side (rumor has it that Besson's Europa Corp. studio was seriously afraid of Russian hacker attacks - and this despite the fact that the president, again according to rumors, was portrayed with all due respect). In the final version of the film, Petrenko alone is responsible for all the problems with the rescue operation - a decrepit Soviet grandfather whose days are obviously numbered and who never existed, a composite character. It is not surprising that Kursk easily received a distribution certificate in our country: Vinterberg and Besson are certainly not going to slander Russia, and in general, who knows what happened there in 2000, everything is different now. But they also reduce the Kursk disaster to a set of heart-rending cliches: a woman's crying, a man's battle for survival, a heartless old man. Having cast excellent actors in the film, they give them not roles, but rather sketches for VGIK students. They do not want to seriously show people losing hope in the face of death. And they end the film with a scene in which the wristwatch of the deceased Averin is given to his son, such is the ending of the tragedy. You don’t even know what to remember first – the famous scene from “Pulp Fiction” or the phrase from the advertisement “With them, you pass on your unique style to the next generation.”

The author is a special correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda

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"The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!", directed by Norman Jewison, starring Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Alan Arkin (1966)
One of the most cheerful Hollywood films about Russians. At the height of the Cold War, a Soviet submarine runs aground off the American coast; the submariners carefully climb out onto land and begin to think about how to fix the situation. The Americans, wound up by propaganda, are hysterical and mistake this for a Russian invasion; meanwhile, one of the sailors begins an affair with a local woman. It all ends in peace, friendship, and chewing gum / The Mirisch Corporation

Why Kursk is not Chernobyl