Candid reptilian pictures – Newspaper Kommersant No. 199 (7400) of 10/26/2022

Valery Fokin’s film “Petropolis” is released. Returning to film directing after a twenty-year break, the artistic director of the Alexandrinsky Theater shot, in the opinion Mikhail Trofimenkov, the first convincing domestic dystopia, practically without special effects.

The film, conceived even before the pandemic, was supposed to be filmed in Russia, the USA and Japan, but the virus broke all plans, and as a result, Tokyo and Miami fit into the space of a huge scenery. Filming ended back in September 2020; nuclear warheads soaring into the sky then seemed just an ominous element of dystopia, and even more so at the time of writing the play by Kirill Fokin, which has been going on in Aleksandrinka since 2016.

The forced poverty of filming only benefited. Following Abel Ferrara, Fokine creates a fantasy world without fancy special effects. At Ferrara, at the New Rose Hotel, the coming apocalypse was locked within the walls of a hotel room. Fokin has four walls of either a bunker, or a cell of a secret prison, or Purgatory itself, where the main character, Vladimir Ognev (Anton Shagin), is thrown. In damp concrete corridors, along which one can seem to run from one reality to another. In a faceless cul-de-sac, where the seductive demon Oziri (Junsuke Kinoshita) made Vladimir an offer he couldn’t refuse. In a space like a gym, where the powers that be come into everyday contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Ognev, a model cosmopolitan brought to the United States by his parents, a Berkeley graduate and specialist in social psychology, has reached the apogee of the American dream. A house on the ocean, a pregnant beauty wife Anna (Yulia Snigir), blue skies, a yellow cabriolet, wild palm trees and skyscrapers, a prestigious teaching job. Not the world, but the spread of a glossy magazine.

The trouble is that behind any dream lies another, much more seductive: deciding the fate of mankind is not bad, right? And for this, join the “world government” of bureaucrats with a rank no lower than the head of a secret department or deputy secretary general of the UN. However, this government also turns out to be fake. Since the late 1940s, it has been under orders from aliens whose saucers have hovered over Miami, Leningrad, Tokyo and Melbourne.

In the hierarchy of planetary power, one cannot do without special services, of course. The most mysterious, ambiguous, attractive and repulsive character of “Petropolis” Michael, aka Misha Mann (excellent Vladimir Koshevoy), oversees contacts with “strangers” on behalf of some organization whose powers are clearly superior to both the CIA and the NSA. As usual, the “chekist” understands best of all the hopelessness of the game, which he himself is leading, and effectively and honestly ends his earthly journey.

The idea, to be honest, is not very fresh – conspiracy theorists have known about the omnipotence of aliens for a long time. But it doesn’t matter: Fokin managed to present the good old legend as something fresh. The suspense in the film builds inexorably. And at the same time, the director unequivocally, albeit indirectly, expressed his attitude towards earthly rulers. Physiognomy, pure physiognomy, but what physiognomy.

Regardless of which country or international structure the persons honored with the Contact represent, they are all sleek nonentities. Demagogues, bureaucrats, careerists, responding to alien instructions with memorized passages that they are making every effort, are looking for the best solutions to a particular problem, without intending, of course, to solve anything. But at the same time, they keep behind their backs the “last argument of kings” – the “Petropolis” system, ready to fire two hundred missiles at each of the four “saucers”. One could say doomedly: “God be their judge,” but there is no god, unless God is a distorted, mechanical voice interrogating the captive Vladimir.

There is only one problem. It is not clear from what kind of philanthropy the alien collective mind for more than half a century generally chimed with the owners of the Earth. He puzzled them with the lack of fresh water in Israel, then the war in Yemen, before offering to end all wars once and for all, disband the armies, erase the borders and live in harmony. And not finished with everyone back in the era of the Cold War.