Absolutely superfluous people – Weekend
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On July 8, the Voices Young Film Festival in Vologda will host the Russian premiere of Blazhi, the only film from Russia to make it to the Cannes Film Festival this year. Ilya Povolotsky filmed his road movie in 2021 — and, despite being too metaphorical, it accurately conveys the feeling of the crumbling time of the end of the previous era.
Father and daughter drive in a broken-down van through a semi-living space, from south to north, from Kabardino-Balkaria to Murmansk, carry a film projector with them, stop in villages where there is at least some kind of life, and show Balabanov’s “Brother” on the big screen and “Loyalty” by Nigina Sayfullaeva. The daughter sells beer and chips, and also takes polaroid photographs of strangers. She wants to go to the sea. The father sells truckers DVD-porn (not Japanese, the Japanese blur everything) and warms local single women – smart, unhappy, the daughter calls this type of “librarian”. Father and daughter are not exactly outlaws (although they probably do not pay taxes), but outcasts, tumbleweeds. They have been traveling like this for fifteen years already, an urn with ashes is rolling with them.
Several genres collide here: coming-of-age drama, road movie, initiation tale, and last but not least, dead man’s journey. You can think of Wenders’ Alice in the Cities, or Buslov’s Boomer, or Hillcoat’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the post-apocalyptic journey of father and son to the sea—any slow movie in which people enter into some kind of relationship with space and lose.
Director Ilya Povolotsky, in his previous film about the relationship of man with space (“Foam”, 2019, a special mention of the IDFA festival), explored how people (including marginals) fit into the harsh conditions of the Kola Peninsula. That film, also at the junction of fiction and non-fiction, still followed real people, conquered the dock space. In Blazhi, the dock and the fiction cannot agree in any way.
Povolotsky, judging by his interview, knows too well what he wanted to shoot, he builds ideas and metaphors, in particular, he says that he initially chose locations and direction of movement to show the metaphor of growing up, “when we descend from the paradise of childhood into the cold reality of the tundra adult life.” He has answers to all questions. Why is there a movie here? “Brother”, Saifullaeva, DVD porn? The director suggests that this is intellectual baggage, that he is filming a story about intelligent people. They are selling Vonnegut and Dovlatov in the middle of the wasteland – it is not clear to whom, because neither their own nor others go here. Or they show “Brother”, because the Internet has not yet been installed in these villages.
“What will you do when they have the Internet?” asks the father’s daughter. “I’ll buy a monkey,” he replies. “With an accordion.”— “Seriously?” “I will plow the land and sow rye.” Both answers are equally bitter jokes, a monkey with an accordion is as meaningless in these parts as rye.
The film was shot in 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, and has a sense not of time, but of its decay. Perhaps this is the main metaphor of the film: timelessness, the meaninglessness of coexistence, the collapse of what the empire-mother once accumulated (the girl carries her mother’s ashes with her).
The actors – Gela Chitava and Maria Lukyanova – are excellent, convincing in their obstinate silence and in their restlessness, but, in essence, they have nothing to play. Generation conflict? Yes, everything is fine with them, like everyone else. The transition from the “paradise of childhood” to the “tundra of adulthood”? And what did they do before, traveled around the “childhood paradise”? Why did they run away? A metaphor works if there is reality underneath it, there is life; if life is adjusted to a metaphor, neither will work. The girl’s initiation looks unconvincing, if only because the heroine is 16 years old – for the first menstruation, with which the film begins (a tampon is given to the girl by another lover of the Father), it is too late. For the first sex, however, just right.
It is impossible not to remember that about 15 (well, a little less) years ago there was a financial crisis, the war in Georgia and the film “Shultes” by Bakur Bakuradze, where the same Gela Chitava played Lesha Shultes’ amnesia. “Whim” shows almost the same hero, unemotional, with a funeral urn, with attempts at the same pauses, with a similar scene closer to the finale. But if “Schultes” presented real heroes of the time – forgetful, collecting their real from what they could steal – then in “Blazhi” everyone exists by inertia, and the car rolls by inertia, and no one needs this Shultes, and “Brother” not needed, not to mention Sayfullaeva. Povolotsky’s film is in no way assembled into a coherent statement, sinks into the sand, fades like old Polaroid photographs.
Perhaps the problem with “Blazhi” is that the characters do not enter into a relationship with space. It is alive, furious, bright thanks to the ingenious camera of Nikolai Zheludovich (“Northerners”, “The Sea is Worried Once”, the Kinotavr Prize for “Bird’s Milk”) – exists on its own, the people in it seem superfluous. Toward the beginning of the film, there is a scene in which the camera is being looked around somewhere outside a repair shop. Once in the center of the frame, the man closes the canister, grabs it more comfortably and carries it to the car, but since the camera moves slowly, there is a feeling that he also has to slow down, that he correlates his movements with the speed of the camera, and this speed is alien to him, he uncomfortable.
This feeling of inconvenience, of otherness arises constantly: secondary characters – even boys discussing that they are bored, they have already seen everything here, it would be better if they went to Paris, even butchers butchering sheep, even a prostitute in the toilet, even a woman (Polina Kutepova), living in a crumbling institution, they all do not seem real. They, even played by locals, look like metaphors.
In the best episodes, the heroes are either not visible, or they freeze, becoming an integral part of the landscape. People generally interfere: they talk, walk, undress, pose, catch up, beat, sell books, watch appliances, don’t let them in, sell gasoline, buy chips, collect dead fish, don’t know where to run. A powerful movie would turn out if people were removed from it altogether. Here empty cars, overtaking each other, cross the steppe through a dusty wall. Here are the windmills. Here is a dead fish covering the road. Buildings are being destroyed, boards are turning black, time is rusting. Here on the big screen, no one shows “Brother” to anyone. “Listen, what is this song?”
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