Autumn microphone – Weekend
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Thirty years ago, in October 1993, the confrontation between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the Supreme Council ended, which resulted in the shooting of the parliament building and the adoption of a new constitution. Alexander Veledinsky’s new film “1993” once again plunges into the events of another fateful year in Russian history – a family drama against the backdrop of a popular uprising based on the novel of the same name by Sergei Shargunov.
Early autumn 1993, Moscow. Vitek Bryantsev (Evgeniy Tsyganov), who dropped out of science and the choir “at five minutes to a candidate of sciences” in his forties, is trying to find himself in the emergency crew. Helps colleagues solve crossword puzzles, sings the song of the NOM group “Choir of Entertainers from the Conductor Reserve” into the microphone of the glasnost booth, and invigorates himself with Royal alcohol. Vitya exchanged his Moscow apartment for an unpretentious suburban dacha with a goat and garlic on the plot. Vitya’s reputation in his own family is not very good.
His wife Lena (Ekaterina Vilkova) has already gotten used to traveling to the city by train, works in the same emergency dispatcher and dreams of succeeding in a mysterious business, daughter Tanya habitually jokes over the fence with the offspring of a much more successful family next door: your dad is an ordinary businessman. , and mine works as a “ninja turtle” and lives in the sewer.
Teenagers don’t really care about their parents’ struggle for survival. They have puberty, first love, cigarettes in secret, in the tape recorder – Yegor Letov and Yanka Diaghileva. And let the adults, like an aging Soviet sewer, burst from depression and overexertion. In the Bryantsev family, as in the whole country, the shaky peace is about to fall under the pressure of general dissatisfaction with the reforms and the hopelessness of family life. While some are for whites and private property, and others are against lawlessness, Vitya dreams of something small: to complete the construction of a street toilet on his site. “At this historical moment, I would really like our family to adapt to the new realities of life as painlessly as possible,” this is how he formulates his political preferences. But “if you are not interested in politics, politics will begin to be interested in you,” reminds Vitya’s business neighbor Jans (Alexander Robak) and it turns out to be right. First, informals fly into his emergency locker, and then Vitya, beaten in the police department, is sucked into a larger political vortex – he becomes a participant in the stand at the White House, where deputies of the Supreme Council are holding the defense against the presidential will of Boris Yeltsin.
Formally released on the thirtieth anniversary of the constitutional crisis of 1993, the film by Alexander Veledinsky is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Sergei Shargunov, winner of the Debut Prize, who once transferred prize money for lawyers for Eduard Limonov, and today a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation faction, a current State Duma deputy, and deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee. by culture. This novel was published on the previous anniversary of the crisis, in 2013. An era has passed since then, Shargunov’s readers, no matter where they are today, definitely live in another country, but neither the many years of the Earth’s circling in a given orbit, nor the political changes of recent times have made the confrontation of 1993 and its outcome more unambiguous.
Veledinsky, as a venerable cinematographer, co-author of the legendary folk “Brigade”, director of a biopic about young Limonov – this is where he and Sergei Shargunov suddenly inevitably converge! – and the screener of several key literary works of our time (here both Alexey Ivanov and Zakhar Prilepin are on the list), left from the book “1993” only the general outline of a “family portrait against the backdrop of the era.” He enlarged and simplified the characters in a cinematic way, on the one hand, removing the severity of the intra-family political conflict, which was so diligently escalated in the book, and on the other, saturating the background with details of time, which are clearly, at least due to his age (the director is 20 years older than the writer) , I remembered better. New iconic heroes also appeared – dashing people to match the characters of the “Brigade”. If Shargunov was more fascinated by the mechanics and chronicle of the bloody street carnival that let Muscovites into a revolutionary dance (he did not deny himself the pleasure of mentioning in the book even the current Minister of Defense), then Veledinsky is clearly more interested in the main actors of the confrontation in those who followed the siege of Ostankino and the White House with sides. It’s even better on TV, like Vitya Bryantseva’s daughter and her friend.
It seems that the director is with them: he is reviewing the footage of the chronicle and does not know what to say into the microphone given to him on the occasion of the glasnost booth, which is going to the cinema under the logo of the Rossiya channel. Puff out your cheeks? Show your tongue? The “face of turmoil” was chosen very accurately—as Central Television journalists call the main character of “1993”—who should play him if not Evgeny Tsyganov? Who else could so accurately portray the inhabitant of this booth – who has seen worse avalanches and St. Bernard crashes in his lifetime? Rushing into his autumn marathon, former engineer Bryantsev, of course, is looking not at the dark future of the country, but at his own crisis of midlife and family life. Significant in this sense seems to be Vitya’s chance meeting with a friend, whom Veledinsky wittily decided to call Ivan Lapshin: two Soviet technicians who launched lunar rovers into space, 20 years later they are patching up sewers, selling erotic calendars on the train and lying to each other, dreaming not about the lofty, but about the urgent matter: to install a toilet in the yard, and to move from the balcony to an apartment before winter begins.
What happened in Moscow in the fall of 1993? The director is in no hurry to answer, although something clearly happened. It’s not for nothing that in one of the film’s episodes the ability to remain silent is called a clear sign of intelligence. But where the silence becomes completely unbearable, the soundtrack, compiled not without graceful opposition, speaks best for the authors. Here you will find not only “NOM”, but also “Mongol Shuudan” with its “Anarchist Battalion”, and foreign agent Boris Grebenshchikov, singing a dissident song about the KGB, a boy and the book “Leadership in the Underground Struggle”, and the group “Zero”, imposingly singing from the TV screen about how nice it is to take a walk while “smoking hashish” (remember, dear readers, that drugs are dangerous to your health). It seems that in order to perceive Veledinsky’s message, it is vital to tune into his musical wavelength. In the end, the defenders of the White House and the defenders of Ostankino may have different flags and different views on the future, but at gunpoint they will always sing the same “Cuckoo” by Tsoi.
In theaters from September 28
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