Air caricature – Newspaper Kommersant No. 55 (7500) dated 03/31/2023

The first episodes of the new domestic series “Actresses”, filmed by Fyodor Bondarchuk and written by Paulina Andreeva, appeared on the Kinopoisk and Wink Internet platforms. The fact that in an ironic production drama about acting everyday life deserves genuine interest, tells Andrey Plakhov.

Three years ago, the same writing team released the TV series Psych. Among its other virtues was its conciseness: energetically written, directed and acted out, it did not waste the audience’s time in vain.

In the new picture, unlike the previous one, there is neither a mysterious intrigue nor a charismatic character placed in the center. But high-quality dramaturgy, suspense built in its own way and a well-founded genre and stylistic key do not allow it to turn into a serial “soap”. Apt dialogues, expertly composed by Paulina Andreeva, are inserted by Bondarchuk into the frame of a melodrama with a slight touch of the musical – and this combination works. Only, it seems, the plot begins to get a little bogged down in intimate clashes and everyday details – as the fragment ends with a grotesque pop number, manifesting the main theme. It can be summed up in words attributed to Meryl Streep: “An actress is more than a woman, an actor is less than a man.”

The film has approximately the same number of female and male characters. And the first, longest fragment is tied to the fate of Gera Koldina (Aleksey Makarov), the star of the fictional Main Drama Theater (GDT), whose most confessional role is Zilov from Duck Hunt. And he, and almost all the other men in the “Actresses” are weak, notorious, victimized. At the same time, they are vain, selfish, capable of treating their wives and girlfriends rather meanly. The quintessence of the insignificance of these narcissistic peacocks is Stepan (Sergey Gilev), who lives in a polyamorous union with two women, but at the same time drowning in alcohol, a would-be artist. Surely men also suffer in their own way and deserve at least condescending sympathy. But the movie is not about them, they are just an inevitable entourage, a background, an atmospheric phenomenon.

The main focus in “Actresses” is aimed at women of this specific profession. They are also familiar with breakdowns, envy and betrayal, but even in their falls they do not look pathetic. They are able to rise up and fight again for the role of their life. The languid beauty Polina (Svetlana Khodchenkova) rushes about between the theater stage and the church choir, then indulges in all serious, then strikes into a pious rage. Temperamental Alena (Elena Nikolaeva) hides her teenage son to appear younger, and puts everything on the line for one last chance to experience acting triumph. Oksana (Polina Pushkaruk) is forced to put aside her professional ambitions for the sake of a dubious family consensus, but it looks like she will someday make a come back – she will return to the stage. Or get a role in the arthouse film “a la Zvyagintsev” – a secret acting dream. There is also Olga (Larisa Milyavskaya), the director of the theater by position, and at heart the same actress – ambitious, assertive and with problems on the love front. They are the sisters of the heroines-actresses from the world cinema classics, from the films of Wilder, Cassavetes, Almodovar. But at the same time, they belong to a different culture and a different era, which is strongly indicated by the titles that precede each couple of episodes: 2014, 2017, 2020.

These are the years of a creeping upheaval in political and socio-cultural life, which led step by step and eventually led to a global crisis. The series does not at all pretend to be an in-depth historical analysis; its goals are much more modest. It does not directly touch on any of the hot topics of the last decade, with the exception of the coronavirus pandemic. There are no gays, no trans people, no floating gender. There is not even a hint of harassment, the exposure of which, especially in the field of theater, cinema and show business, the passionaries of our days gave their strength to. Not a single director seduces actresses either at auditions or at rehearsals, although there are a thousand other ways to humiliate them. Only now the humiliation is not based on gender, but on a professional basis: an actor, an actress is a dependent profession, and nothing can be done about it. But men wither and break, and women are steel magnolias, they bloom and grow stronger, and it’s not even always visible from the outside what it costs them.

A little more attention in the film is paid to censorship, which has been refined and ferocious all these years. However, her offensive is also shown without pressure, in tones of light satire: we are talking about the reaction of officials of the conditional Ministry of Culture to a performance in the State Duma Theater by a French touring director. No, the heroes and heroines of the picture do not discuss the theatrical scandals of the decade – neither the incident in Novosibirsk with the opera “Tannhäuser”, nor the case of the Seventh Studio. They, the actors, seem apolitical, busy exclusively with career and personal affairs. Nevertheless, the movement towards regression and the accumulation of toxins are unmistakably felt in the intonation of the film: from slightly ironic at the beginning, it comes closer to the finale to almost misanthropic. And in a harmless caricature of artistic bohemia, a transcript of the heavy breathing and repressed emotions of our time begins to appear.