By pike command

One of the best copyright films of the year - “Express” - already on the screens

“Express” is a debut full-length picture of Ruslan Bratov, that very director who shot a breathtakingly ridiculous and accurate short film “La Li-La Ba-la-Li”-a dizzying metaphor, to loss of consciousness, Russian life. Before the New Season festival, where Express received the main prize, it became the triumph of the “Window to Europe” film festival (three awards - the main one, for operator work and for the acting ensemble).

At first, you will not guess that this is a comedy, even if black or gray-brown-raspberry. The scene is a small town lost among the mountains in Karachay-Cherkessia. Everything will begin with blackness: we look from the darkness up - into the circle of heavenly light. Like Malevich vice versa. It turns out that we look from the hatch ... through the eyes of a hedgehog. Two strangers met, hearing a rustle, looking into the hatch. This is a student Sanya Soslanov with a landmark nickname SOS ( Lev Zulkarnaev ) and a restless blond Oleg ( Pavel Vorozhtsov ). From the hatch they pull out the fallen hedgehog.

After such a live acquaintance, they go to the local bookmaker. The stranger persuades the stranger to issue a card for his passport (his limits are finally exhausted), a thousand rubles will automatically appear on the new card. You can put on the Express: you can correctly guess eight results of sports matches - you win a million.

In general, a favorite and obviously losing national idea “Play and win!”. A twist with a card and a possible gain is a skeleton of a criminal plot that is overgrown with a pulsating flesh of the place.

This city is similar to a dream about the 90s or the remains of the Soviet Empire: a flashed dormitory with iron beds, a dilapidated by a plastic garbage pool, built for the 1980 Olympics, almost “ancient Greek” stadium ruins, overgrown with moss, fading panels, corridors of the institutions of almost forgotten dirty color.

A taxi breaks here, because trees stick out of the hatches, a pharmacy settled by someone is on fire, and then the heroes rustle from some unknown substances. And one of them, swaying from side to side, jumps with a gorilla ... It’s good out of the window ... The window is specially broken to get into the local catalak ... such a “criminal reading” or early Guy Ricci is in the slow North Caucasus retelling.

At the same time, each of the absurd events is ironically motivated. This is not a delusional plot, this is the reality of the “O3” O3 is irrational, absurd, ridiculous, in it, bikes and legends are more important and true than reality. And Emelya - Snowing about the “shit of the command” - the last event “Express”, which will bring him happiness, the love of the princess (an adult teacher running around the stadium) and wealth. Tambov will win with Spartak, Chelsea - at Liverpool ...

The bookmaker has free coffee, on a night street - a lantern, a pharmacy is on, Nina, which is flopping out the pine from the panel, does not come out. But the urki, who learned about the Express, will clamp him in the “fraternal” hugs. But they are not a brother and his strength is not in truth, but in a farm. Yes, I almost forgot about the blond Oleg. Having lost the apartment, he enthusiastically shrubs on the guitar and unsuccessfully hopes to enter the killed room with his dog and hedgehog in the box. By the way, the same. From the prologue.

And only the Circassian mountains frozen forever look down on this stupid flickering, running in a circle of suns and its roots.

“What is the holiday today? - Local men ask the passerby, who arrived in the late evening on the Gogol wagon with a donkey. "City or Russian?" The question is not idle, it depends on it when the same lantern is turned off near the bookmaker and another open hatch will be more. ” “Holiday,” the passerby replies.

In the Express, laconic dialogues with boy vocabulary are verified to interjections - absolutely truthful (in places very funny) and surprise (script authors - the director himself with the artist Mikhail Khuranov ). Here is the spirit of the cinema of Lutsik and Samorov, Vasily Sigarev, Sergey Loban and a film from the air height-the "Cloud-RAS" of Nikolai DELAL. Casting mainly from unprofessional actors with expressive and unforgettable faces. How is a taxi driver’s face cut by wrinkles, who will have to make a painful decision - to give the client a forgotten wallet or not?

At the New Season festival, I watched the picture a second time. Knowing the plot, I enjoyed how it was made, how the camera works in time with a heart rate, what a thoughtful light in the film, at times magical (as in an episode with the same lantern, similar to the night sun), at times everyday, dreary.

In a retelling, this movie looks like Chernukha, but “Express”, which begins to visciously begins slowly, like life in the province: gradually gains momentum and lucky, fares to the light from the hatch. Only in the finale the camera will suddenly look into a black circle, like into the abyss. And again Malevich will remember.

By the way, Ruslan Brother Brothers conceived this film four years ago. But how perspicacious.

"Will this reach the wheel to Kazan?" It is unlikely. Very dark. Although who knows?