About good greetings – Newspaper Kommersant No. 38 (7483) dated 03/04/2023

Pyotr Todorovsky’s “Healthy Man” was released, which became the best film in the “Russian Premieres” competition of the Moscow International Film Festival 2022. Julia Shagelman I was pleased with how mature and smart the director’s second full-length work turned out to be.

The premiere of “Healthy Man” at the Moscow International Film Festival took place before the debut of Todorovsky Jr., the romantic comedy “Love Story”, filmed back in 2007, but stuck on the way to the big screen due to financial problems and producer disagreements, reached the rental. The director, however, managed to shoot another series about office workers, whose life changed dramatically after missing a flight on a business trip, but the break between the two films definitely benefited him. Now “Love Story”, a collection of symptoms of entertaining domestic cinema of the early 2000s, can be safely attributed to a mistake of youth and start right away with a new tape dedicated to a rare for our cinema, complex and often controversial topic of charity.

Egor (Nikita Efremov) and Maya (Irina Starshenbaum) are among those who are far from this topic and hardly remember it at all, except that they participate in the annual pre-holiday sending of gifts to some orphanage. This is a prosperous Moscow couple, both work as presenters on a popular sports TV channel, love each other and raise a little daughter, honestly dividing parental care in half. The turning point in their lives is the evening when they hear women’s cries for help coming from the yard. Egor wants to go out and intervene, Maya believes that a call to the police will be enough, the rest is none of their business. According to the director and screenwriter, the inspiration for the film came from a similar incident in his life when he didn’t come out and help, and was ashamed the next day. Egor, on the other hand, takes a decisive step beyond the threshold, saves an unknown girl from a drunken roommate who attacked her with a knife – and becomes a hero in the eyes of not only everyone around him, but also, what is there, his own.

Alas, this pleasant feeling does not last long. The next evening, the scumbag released by the police still kills the girl, and Egor’s euphoria shatters into small pieces. However, this is not just grief over such an absurdly accidental and at the same time terribly ordinary death of a young woman. He has already managed to feel like a good person, whose life is filled not only with work, family dinners and mortgage payments, but also with something more – and now he desperately lacks this feeling. To fill the void, the existence of which he did not even suspect, Yegor goes to volunteer at the children’s oncological hospital, and when this is not enough, to the search and rescue team “Lisa Alert”.

Of course, here he will have to part with many illusions. It turns out that charity is not an inspirational impulse and not an easy way to make one’s existence meaningful (what Stefan Zweig once called “the impatience of the heart”), but everyday, routine, hard and often unpleasant work. To cope with it, you must not give vent to emotions, otherwise a cheerful dance in a cheburek costume in front of dying children will end up with them having to console you, and they already have enough worries. In addition, Yegor’s new hobby has a downside: he pays less and less attention to those close to him, who consider his sudden asceticism to be just a hobby that is becoming an increasingly strange hobby. A healthy person cannot care and worry about others more than about himself and his family – such is the verdict of his wife, friend, employees, whose admiration is gradually replaced by irritation. After all, Egor, with his volunteering, voluntarily or involuntarily makes them weigh their own actions.

The film, however, is completely devoid of straightforward black-and-white morality and does not pass judgment on its characters. And Yegor is not a knight in shining armor at all, but a man who makes mistakes and often hurts his loved ones. And his wife, who just wants her husband to be the partner she could rely on, is also quite understandable. In the end, despite the seemingly well-defined ending, “Healthy Man” does not provide simple recipes that can cure social and moral ulcers. But he offers to do at least something first – for example, respond when someone asks for help, or sing a song about pasties to someone who needs it right now.