Back to the rebellious – Newspaper Kommersant No. 144 (7345) of 08/10/2022

In just a week, the new clip of the DDT group “Not with you”, directed by Ksenia Shutka, crept up to the mark of a million views on YouTube. For pop artists pouring serious budgets into promoting their videos on video platforms, such an indicator may not be a sensation. But for a group that ranks as “veteran” and always plays fair, this is an unprecedented leap forward. Boris Barabanov talks about how Karen Shakhnazarov’s “Courier” and The Rolling Stones met on the set of DDT.

The song “Not with you” was included in the 21st studio album of the DDT group “Creativity in the Void”, released in October 2021. “Don’t turn over, we live here. But who sent us all to this?”, “Pull out your teeth so that you become harmless, anyway, I will never be with you” – these and other lines of the song were written even earlier. The premiere of the composition took place in 2019 at the Invasion festival. So “Not with you” is not a song for the topic of the day. And, probably, not a prophecy, but a statement of the obvious. And the clip, also known as a short film, is a variation on the eternal theme of “fathers and children”.

The first commentators of the video on the network instantly noticed the similarity of the first, playful part of the film with the scene from the film “Courier” by Karen Shakhnazarov.

Vladimir Menshov’s monologue about the new generation is well remembered by viewers of the older generation. However, this is not a literal quote, more precisely, a quote, but not from the movie. “This is an absolutely real, overheard and recorded monologue of a living person, brilliantly played by the actor Oleg Almazov,” Ksenia Shutka tells Kommersant. “In terms of structure, I really made it look like Menshov’s monologue from Courier, and this is on purpose to point out the similarities times.”

“Courier” in general, from beginning to end, sounds modern. The film has long lived a life separate from its creator Karen Shakhnazarov, now a sought-after television propagandist. The theme of people in uniform and the upcoming military service is present both in the “Courier” and in the video. One of the heroes of Not With You, an artist and photographer, goes to the army, and his letter to a friend who has remained in civilian life is the finale of the clip.

“The types are really copied from my friends when they were at the age of heroes, but I am absolutely convinced that the youth, or rather, certain groups of them, do not change at the root,” says Mrs. Joke. “The text in the final is a real message from a guy from the army to his friend. But posted two years ago. He just forwarded it to me … I pasted this message as a letter, without editing.

It is worth saying here that Yuri Shevchuk himself once traveled to hot spots, and his son Peter studied at the Kronstadt Naval Cadet Corps and served in the Marine Corps (the director learned about the latter fact from a conversation with a Kommersant correspondent). It is worth remembering this when you hear that Shevchuk is accused of discrediting the army.

If desired, in the video “Not with you” you can find all the “toxic” motives that are now willingly used by all sorts of patriot guardians and parent organizations, attacking rock musicians. Here is a bottle of wine flying in graffiti with the word “stability”, and a game with the theme of suicide, and rallies, and kisses indiscriminately at parties. Ksenia Shutka explains: “For me, these topics are not taboo. It’s just the quintessence of protest age markers of certain types shown in the clip. At the age of 17, rebellion and a craving for the forbidden are sewn into a person. Through this, probably, separation from parents begins. And this is one of the perpetual motion machines of mankind.”

There are no DDT musicians in the video at all. “Not With You” echoes the later Rolling Stones videos – “Streets Of Love”, “Ride Em On Down”, “Scarlet”, “Criss Cross”.

Over the years, shooting staged (non-concert) videos, the Rolling Stones gradually began to fade into the shadows, appearing only in rare shots and bringing to the fore young, overflowing with life characters, rebellious and reaching for the forbidden. This wise strategy is also characteristic of 65-year-old Yuri Shevchuk.

“Many lines hit me, especially “the light does not go out in your eyes, everything will die here, but the truth will not,” says Ksenia Shutka. “I really liked the youthful rebellion inherent in this phrase.”

There are a lot of little things in the clip that you want to disassemble and solve. Now the phrase of the hero conscript “It remains only to endure and return home” or the portrait of Dzerzhinsky on the wall during the banquet, the generation of “parents” willy-nilly try on by 2022. And the young viewer also keeps track of the daring challenges that the main characters arrange for themselves.

All this was conceived by the director and the group back in 2021, but time, without asking anyone, became a full-fledged co-author of the film.

And it has added meaning. As the director says, “new and scary.”