A Tale of Speculative Time – Weekend
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“The Year of Birth” is being released, a coming-of-age drama with elements of carnival mysticism, filmed after eight years of silence by Mikhail Mestetsky, who continues to look at his native lands through the prism of postmodernism. Zinaida Pronchenko – about how relevant this is today.
Our days, dull, provincial Metallogorsk (the location is fictitious, but recognizable). In one of the rickety panels, Philip is dreaming about the beautiful Russia of the future – a passionate fan of the punk band “Egg Light”, which thundered in the nineties, but has since been happily forgotten by everyone. Philip turned his wretched apartment into a museum – numerous closets and mezzanines are filled with rare records, faded photographs and other much stranger artifacts. The fact is that the lead singer of “Egg Light” Soplya (a bright cameo by Yura Borisov) went to the very edge in serving music, once sawing off his head with a chainsaw at a concert. Philip also cataloged the suicide weapon with trepidation, not yet realizing that soon the chainsaw, like that same gun on the wall, would come in handy again. One day, Marina, the daughter of a regional tycoon who made his fortune in the meat industry, comes to visit him. The crazy plans of Philip, who dreams of organizing Woodstock in Metallogorsk and reviving his beloved city from the ashes, have a strong influence on her purely materialistic perception of reality. Now she shows the chosen one to the parents, and then to the chosen one – a positive pregnancy test.
The “Year of Birth” collision is as old as time. And, in general, just as banal. Of course, Philip’s enthusiasm will encounter the cynicism of those around him, and the blossoming of his first love will be prevented by a complete lack of money. Building a family is not like playing punk. And Philip will have to go among the people who do not believe in anything other than the dollar exchange rate, even though most often they have never even seen that dollar. The festival, which according to a brilliant idea was called “Mesivo” (Metallogorsk Syncretic Revival), will be renamed by the father-in-law to “Russian Jelly”, guitars will be replaced with skewers, instead of mohawks, strong heads will be piled up in front of the stage. The dream will be trampled, spat on, destroyed. And even Philip’s father, it turns out, was once employed in “Egg Light” on bass, and now repairs iPhones in the basement, will condemn his son for fantasizing that in Russia death is similar.
In the finale, however, a bright yellow, egg-colored ray of invigorating sense of our dignity will emerge from behind the clouds.
Film lovers, as well as the liberal public, once had high hopes for Mikhail Mestetsky. He filmed the infantilism that reigned for almost 20 years in this environment with brilliance. Typically, all of Mestetsky’s characters are moderately stupid, not money-grubbers at all, and prefer either asceticism or rebellion to material goods and systemic values - meaningless and absolutely private, not noticed by anyone, not appreciated by anyone. In part, this message fit into the popular theory of small deeds that left the sovereign’s property to the sovereign, and in part – in the well-known tradition of touching the odd person in Soviet stagnant cinema: “Flying in a dream and in reality,” “Autumn Marathon,” “In love by choice,” “Vacation.” in September”. The only difference was that Mestetsky’s creatures didn’t have any pain or even ache in their souls; the space around them seemed neither cramped nor disastrous, but simply boring. And in this sense, his heroes are closer to Ivan from “Courier” than to Sergei Makarov from Balayan’s imperishable film. The fact that Mestetsky at some point took up writing the script for “Legend Number 17,” the picture that marked the beginning of the sports-patriotic canon, somewhat sobered up critics: are all these “Rag Unions” really empty self-indulgence?
“Year of Birth” looks like a decisive break with the past, but it is not. The jokes are over, it’s time for programs for younger children. Clearly identifying himself with the main character, Mestetsky wants in this fairy tale about the main thing to start a conversation about the important, to convince the audience that even in the space of depression, which is Russia, if you really want to, you can “fly away” – into space or at least into internal emigration. That miracles happen. That severed heads attached to the body with tape continue to sing about love and hope for the best. Mestetsky, who long ago founded the Shklovsky group, also has an obvious desire to bow to the shadows of deceased revolutionaries – for example, the leader of the St. Petersburg “Chimera” Starkov and, of course, Yegor Letov.
As in previous works – “Legs – Atavism” or “Rag Union” – the narrative here is replete with speculative metaphors, denoting something that until 2022 the author lacked the talent to talk about without hipster tricks, but now he lacks the courage, and there is censorship doesn’t sleep. A fairy tale, as we remember, is an ideal genre for thoughtful allusions to disasters that cannot be said directly. The nineties are also ideal material for hints, today exploited on both sides of the ideological front. As Dickens once wrote in “A Tale of Two Cities” – it was the best of times, it was the worst of times… The main thing is that you can remember that time out loud, but you can only think about the present one to yourself.
In a fairy tale, the end is always the crowning achievement; in life, the end sometimes looks like a funeral. And no amount of faith in miracles, or in oneself, or in the nineties, which can be repeated in one particular district of Metallogorsk, will bring anyone back from the other world. And in this sense, “Year of Birth,” like “Mash,” which turned into “Russian Jelly,” should be renamed “Year of Death.” There are only lies on the screens, albeit full of soul-saving hints.
In theaters from November 9
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