Chronicles of a Lost Man – Weekend – Kommersant

On January 18, Nikolai Dostal, the author of the most important film of the era of perestroika Cloud-Paradise, and more than twenty other works for film and television, passed away. Throughout his career, he has filmed about a person against the backdrop of a big story. His characters weren’t good or bad, but rather small and lost in the maelstrom of time.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

Shalopai Kolya (Andrey Zhigalov) walks around the neighborhood of his native five-story panel building, standing in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, out of boredom of the life diet, in order to dilute the Sunday slumber, blurts out to his neighbors that he decided to move for happiness to the other end of the country – to Vladivostok. Friends and buddies are accustomed to Kolya’s escapades and at first they do not take him very seriously: but Kolya is firm – everything has already been decided, the departure is scheduled for the evening. The whole yard happily collects it on the road.

Against the dim background of elementary life, where the purchase of an umbrella and a saucepan is a whole event, Colin’s demarche against the usual reality is a feat of cosmic proportions. For a couple of hours, Kolya is at the zenith of fame, in the ray of attention: he will have a suitcase (after all, what kind of person are you without a suitcase, “like a tree, all your life in one place”), he will have a dump party with toasts and instructions. Even the love of a lifetime looked into the light and cried from the imminent parting. Kolya himself is no longer glad that he blurted out, but the word flew out – you won’t catch it. And here he is in the bus, looking back at the crowd of mourners and sees how inexorably breaks away from him his unsightly and tired, but still such a dear and understandable life. And the search for “cloud-paradise” begins. The work of the same name, the most famous and significant in the filmography of Nikolai Dostal, with all its mocking intonation, ends on a note that is almost tragic. A man’s life has collapsed, even if you keep in mind the return that the director will arrange for his hero 15 years later (“Kolya – rolling stone”, 2005).

The script on which “Cloud Paradise” was filmed was called “High Point Local Time”. And the time when the film came out was for many in the USSR a moment of fearful numbness – as if the hands of the clock were about to be translated, and the dial was about to be a new time, but no one yet knows what. Dostal, in the manner of his hero, peered into a dusty urban-type settlement flooded with the setting summer sun, and for the turn of the eighties and nineties this look was not quite usual. There was no malice or bitterness in him. Dostal was not equal to Vasily Pichul, who contemptuously looked around the provincial world in “Little Vera”, or Vladimir Khotinenko, who did not want to let his heroes go from the world of childhood in “Mirror for a Hero”. The heroes of “Cloud-Paradise” were not interested in the past, and the present was ready to be set free at any second. One has only to take the globe in his hands, spin it and, pointing his finger at the first point that comes across, submit to fate. Here everything depended on the person: “The earth is round, but life is flat!” And it doesn’t matter that Kolya’s farewell to the other end of the world (read, to the next world) was so similar to a wake. Two deaths cannot happen, but one cannot be avoided – a fictional journey turned a person without a suitcase into a figure of tragic proportions, raising him above the yard, the house and its inhabitants, in other words, giving the opportunity to look around. “So let’s drink to the scale!” – Colin’s friend Fedya pronounces a toast, as if he does not understand what is going on, and does not see how infinite time and infinite space surround his friend.

Director Nikolai Dostal saw and understood this well. Perhaps he realized this while on the set of the film Goodbye, Boys (1964) by Mikhail Kalik, a landmark picture of the Thaw, where a 17-year-old Mosfilm boy, the son of director Dostal Sr., who died in 1959 on the set, played one of the main roles – a thin Jewish teenager living in the seaside town of the 1930s, the last days of pre-war childhood – both his own and the world. From the insignificant details of peacetime, the funny and naive dialogues of three boys by the sea, in the finale of “Goodbye, boys” the scale also grows. The viewer understands that this sun-drenched world is about to be covered with a dark and terrible war, in which its inhabitants will perish forever. This tragic finale will become a kind of tuning fork for Dostal – and Cloud Paradise, his main film, is in its own way one of its endless variations.

Today, when Nikolai Dostal is gone, you feel especially keenly that our cinema has lost an author with a unique device of vision. He rightfully inherited the humanistic thaw tradition, being able to snatch out the small against the background of the big, momentary and quivering against the backdrop of the unbearable and boundless. I saw a man against the backdrop of space and time. It is hardly a coincidence that “Cloud Paradise” was filmed in 1990 and released in cinemas in the fall of 1991, when the whole country, like the protagonist of the film, went to an unknown destination without the right to return.

In each of his works, it was precisely this ratio of sizes, scale, the opportunity to consider a person against the backdrop of history that made sense. As in one of the first anti-Stalinist films Shura and Prosvirnyak (1987), unnoticed by the public, he presented a big era in an insignificant story of a petty scoundrel, insignificant, humiliated, but habitually surviving in the late 1930s. As in the film “Peter on the Road to the Kingdom of Heaven” (2009), where the life of the post-war Union was reflected in the fate of a local fool who decided to serve as a traffic inspector. The dummy pistol in Petya’s holster seems to be insignificant against the background of the watchtowers of the nearby camp, but it is made from the same wood. What’s there, the difference in scale is read even in the title of Fazil Iskander’s film adaptation of Dostalev’s “The Little Giant of Big Sex” (1992), where the sex life of a beach photographer is destroyed by a meeting with Lavrenty Beria.

In Russia of the last decade, such an approach to history and such a look at time through the eyes of a person who does not at all look like a hero, to put it mildly, were not encouraged. The scandal around Dostal’s series “Shtrafbat” (2004) was loud, against which, years after the release, the Minister of Culture and a great connoisseur of historical myths Vladimir Medinsky took up arms. Later, with no less fervor, but already the researchers of Varlam Shalamov reproached for postmodern cynicism and extravagant interpretation of history staged according to the script by Yuri Arabov “Lenin’s Testament”. Their other joint work – the last completed film by Nikolai Dostal “The Monk and the Demon” (2016) – also came under attack from criticism, but this time from the church. The convergence of Dostal’s directing with Arabov’s dramaturgy seems quite understandable: Alexander Sokurov’s “Tetralogy of Power” written by Arabov also dealt with the dizzying disparity between the scale of a person and the history that he makes.

For Dostal, perhaps only drowned in the XVII century far from us, telling about the terrible consequences of the reforms of Patriarch Nikon, “Split” passed on the screens more or less peacefully. But the director himself was hardly looking for these scandals. He did not reveal the ulcers of history, but simply tried to look at the fighters of the penal battalion, Shalamov and the noblewoman Morozov, in the same way as at the flaneur Kolya, the lame Prosvirnyak and the loving Marat, with a sympathetic and strict look, understanding and questioning, in the highest degree humane. In the end, all people, both big and small, are first of all people. And none of them are really small enough to seep through the sieve of time unharmed.

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