Review of the film “Panic Attacks” by Ivan Tverdovsky
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At the box office is “Panic Attacks” by one of the most original and most uneven Russian directors, Ivan Tverdovsky, a film that received the main prize of the Winter Festival at the end of 2023. Initially skeptical Mikhail Trofimenkov By and large, I understood little in this terrible polar tale, but capitulated to its magical power.
What is it, what is it about, how is it done? “Panic attacks” are such a thing in themselves that it is impossible to answer these questions unambiguously, and is it even necessary. It’s better to dive into the film, as the girl Vika (Lena Tronina) dives into a mystical puddle, jumping out of the second floor window of a boring panel house in the village of Nikel, Murmansk region. And not just to come to terms with the apparent monotony of the action, but to feel in this monotony the clear, addictive rhythm of the northern timelessness, the northern vastness.
What associations do “Panic attacks” evoke? Probably the films of Aki Kaurismaki of the past, the times of his “Proletarian Trilogy”, the times of “The Girl from the Match Factory” (1990), where the meaningless and hopeless course of life exploded with an equally meaningless and hopeless, but bloody catharsis.
The easiest way to interpret “Panic Attacks” is as a black social story. Living in Nikel is suffocating in the literal sense of the word: sulfur fumes, you know, from the city-forming plant. They explain Vika’s attacks of panic claustrophobia.
“Open the door!” – this scream of Vicky pierces the entire action of the film. She is always locked somewhere. In the bathroom, where in the prologue the Nickel staff witch performs a certain ritual over her. In her home, where her daughter, who is eager to leave for Norway, is locked up by her mother (Svetlana Kamynina). At the border checkpoint, where an officer abuses his official position, taking advantage of the opportunity to grope an inaccessible ex-classmate.
It seems that the only place where Vika will not fight in hysterics and demand to open the doors is a Norwegian prison, where her soul, tormented by unknown demons, will find shelter and peace for many years.
By the way, about demons. Vika’s receipt of her international passport is preceded by that very strange ceremony in the bathroom. Jumping from a window into a surreal puddle of unprecedented depth is reminiscent of Alice falling into a rabbit hole, except that it is very cold. Another such rabbit hole is the Kola superdeep well, near which her sister’s ex-boyfriend Nikitos (Sergei Dvoinikov) stops when he is taking her to Norway. Delov is a pipe that supposedly goes tens of kilometers deep into the earth. But, says local wisdom, by shouting your deepest desires into this trumpet, you can enlist the help of the forces of hell.
Well, she shouted. Well, I got it. Well, my wishes came true. They didn’t quite come true as Vika imagined, who dreamed of staying forever in the magical kingdom of the Norwegian elves, but they did come true.
This is the whole mystery and all the charm of “Panic Attacks”. Something purely irrational flickers through the rough and dull sociality. Through the mysticism of situations and actions, merciless and suicidal, the social madness of provincial life. Cars wrapped in warm covers, in which couples are making out, on the streets of Nikel are no less surreal than the hot windows of Kirkenes, behind which a charmingly party, but, as it turns out, also deadly life is in full swing.
The plot of crossing the border, escaping from the conventional Nikel to the equally conventional Europe is too easy to fit into the current agenda. The superficial, social layer seems to be unambiguous. No elves are waiting with their wings spread, such as Vik in any Kirkenes. The story of her sister Lena (Daria Savelyeva), who crossed the border before Vika, is merciless.
Does Ivan Tverdovsky want to say that someone else’s prison is a much nicer home for fugitives than their own prison home? Hardly. The final episodes, which seem to illustrate this thesis, are too strange not to lead to a terrible suspicion: perhaps these are not posthumous visions of the heroine. But he also does not declare that his home-prison is better than these visions. What remains, which is where the whole appeal of the film lies, is in the floating, flickering, intermind space.
And if any moral of the film can be formulated, it will be a paraphrase of the banality “It’s good where we are not”: “It’s bad where we are.”
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