Chronicle of the announced death – Newspaper Kommersant No. 200 (7401) of 10/27/2022

At the festival “Message to Man” – the premiere of the film by Lyubov Arkus “Balabanov. Bell tower. Requiem”. A new type of documentary intimate-psychological research was seen in it Andrey Plakhov.

The beginning of the film is an energetic and accurate film history portrait of the most controversial director of Russian cinema. Lyubov Arkus is so convinced of her concept of his work that she presents it as an indisputable reality. She does not enter into polemics with today’s detractors of Balabanov, who is allegedly responsible for the expansion of the “brotherhood”. Was he a nationalist? No. Did you love Russia? Rather endured – as long as he could. The biggest country where you can get away from it. Did you love people? Sorry. But he did not trust. There is arrogance in this look, but there is no hypocrisy and hypocrisy.

Then the film history essay ends, and the chronicle of the announced death begins – a detailed, sensual film that captures the last months of the director’s life, who knows for sure his imminent end.

If you look at this chronicle sequentially (not so in the film), it will begin with the discovery that Balabanov made as a boy, and then described in a youthful story: a person is mortal. The impetus that brought the director closer to self-destruction and a speedy departure was the tragedy on the set of the film “River”, where the actress Tuyara Svinoboeva died, and then the disaster in the Karmadon Gorge. They had a particularly close relationship with Sergei Bodrov. Having killed his beloved artist, the glacier also overtook Balabanov. He, according to producer Sergei Selyanov, was waiting for death, he believed that it would be fair.

It is extremely curious to watch and listen to Balabanov’s speeches to the public. In the St. Petersburg bookstore “Order of Words”, the reckless youth perceives him not even as a sacred monster, but as an eccentric grandfather. He gives categorical monosyllabic answers to odious questions. What makes you happy in life? Nothing. Are you happy? No. Were you happy? Was in the 1990s because I was young.

Why can’t the director achieve happiness, but happiness can’t achieve it? “I have killed more people in my films than the gangsters could ever dream of.” Someone does not like that he speaks quietly, they demand to raise his voice. “I never speak loudly, and if I yell, I get a different emotion.” And most importantly, what the young will obviously not understand: “They told me that I would die a year and a half ago. But it hasn’t come off yet. It will come off soon.” And so it happened.

Journalists arrange an inquiry for him. They are trying to find a connection between him and, for example, Pelevin. “Pelevin is a good writer, but there is no connection.” Whoever has not compared Balabanov with Dostoevsky, but no one is able to wrest from him a declaration of love for one of the domestic classics. Lyubov Arkus gets down to business – and finally! He loved Remarque, as well as Hemingway and Salinger, the latter read in the original. Well, Kafka, of course. Quite far from the blondness attributed to the director.

The most piercing scenes are played out on the set of the film “I also want” in the Yaroslavl region and in Kostroma, where Arkus persuaded Balabanov to go for medical treatment and at the same time look for nature for a future (and never held) production. Several cameramen who worked on the film created a collection of masterpiece close-ups of the director and his wife Nadia. In these tragic portraits, one can see the transcendence that led and attracted him. In other words, the consciousness of the “damned poet” who makes a breakthrough into new hidden meanings. You have to be crazy, “sick in the head” to make this breakthrough.

Even Thomas Mann said that healthy, respectable people do not write novels and do not compose music. This also applies to cinema, and Balabanov seemed to have been born in order to confirm this thesis. But here’s the paradox. A relic sample of the “damned poet”, he at the same time became a folk hero of Russian film folklore. Leftists, national revanchists, and government propaganda wanted to join Brother. But he gave them backhand with his “Cargo-200”, leaving no illusions. Then the director’s remarks become more and more intimate. In his last film, “I also want”, the relationship of the characters with God and death is almost their own, in the spirit of folk, not official religion. The dilapidated skeleton of the bell tower and the church with holes, with peeled frescoes – here it is, that real and ghostly world of Balabanov, into which the audience of the films “Happy Days” and “About Freaks and People” fell, with flooded St. Petersburg streets and empty trams. On the fortieth day after the death of Alexei, the bell tower collapsed. And Balabanov’s Petersburg no longer exists and never will.

Nadya Vasilyeva (Balabanova) and their son Petya, Lyuba Arkus, and her grandson Misha are witnesses of the last “happy days”. Very sad, but with a timid smile of happiness. Here Balabanov stares at the street musician for a long time. Here he says, looking at the monument to Ivan Susanin: “Our man.” Here he teaches little Misha to play chess and scares him with his broken fingers. No matter what trials and sorrows life brings, there is happiness: it is in the presence of loved ones, in the fact that there is no need to explain anything, in the fact that there is a ghostly world given to us in sensations, which one day will collapse for everyone, and perhaps , and for everyone at once.