Cinema of moral stupidity – Newspaper Kommersant No. 160 (7361) of 09/01/2022

At the Moscow Film Festival (MIFF) screenings of domestic films continue. The favorite of Russian film screenings, Dmitry Davydov, presented his new, unlike anything else film in the main competition, and the young authors of Russian Premieres can’t get rid of the influence of the nineties, which they just barely had time to catch due to their age. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

Boris Akopov, whose debut film “Bull” received the main prize of “Kinotavr” in 2019, presented his second feature film “Kat” in the “Russian Premieres” competition. The first tape told about the lost generation of the 1990s on behalf of a person who was born in 1985, therefore, he relied on his childhood memories, adult stories and common ideas about that era in the spirit of Monetochka’s song (“They hung crosses on homies, / Smoothed strawberry jackets / And to dances – blood from everyone’s ears, / After all, only “Tender May” played on the radio”), but it turned out quite convincingly. The action of the second takes place in our time, its convex signs are on the screen, from medical masks lowered to the chin to policemen dispersing an unauthorized rally, but the film itself seems to be a greeting from the same “dashing” decade.

From there, from the nineties and their greedy interest in everything hitherto forbidden, and the story of a prostitute Kate (bright debutante Anastasia Kuvshinova), who owed her pimp (Dmitry Kartashov) during her forced maternity leave, who now has to work off this debt. As well as this pimp himself, interspersing earnest prayers with narcotic parishes, and a gallery of supporting characters, including, for example, a depraved deputy (Grigory Bagrov) and a hypocritical popular singer (Nikolai Schreiber), and pictures of the metropolitan nightlife with orgies and female fights are not sometimes in mud, sometimes in black caviar. The author clearly feels like someone like Virgil, leading the audience through the Moscow hell, and he could even be praised for his courage in exposing social vices, if the script moves and the characters were not such a set of the most murky clichés. This is especially true for the depiction of LGBT people and gender relations. Although the film has a female look, women here, including the main character, remain just objects of male desires, complexes, ambitions and fantasies, including directorial ones.

Another “Russian premiere” is “F20” by Arseniy Gerasimov, who, according to the festival catalog, is now filming “a series of documentaries about the heroes of Donbass, about people, about the life and work of Russian special services” in Donetsk and nearby regions. They will probably have to be watched at the next festivals, but for now, the audience of the MIFF got acquainted with the director’s acting debut, in the title of which the main plot spoiler is encrypted: F20 is the code for paranoid schizophrenia according to ICD-10. The main character Oleg (Pavel Davydov), a boxer-loser and a drug addict, suffers from a mental illness that is not directly indicated in the film. He hangs out on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, with varying success trying to get rid of addiction, gets into fights with random strangers, dreams of traveling around the world with his best friend Lekha (Mikhail Troinik) and, like the hero of Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, sees dead people. All this, again, tangibly smacks of the nineties, most of all Balabanov’s “Brother”, but the next copy from the cult original came out so pale that it is rather pointless to look at it.

The Yakut director Davydov demonstrates an enviable creative prolificacy: Molodist, participating in the MIFF, is already his third film this year, after Illegal, which was released in May, and Songs of Summer, which premiered at the Window to Europe festival. in August. And at the same time, he is not afraid to experiment with genres: social drama, ethno-folk comedy, and now – an amazing fusion of harsh Yakut magical realism with absurdist farce, voiced by the compositions of the rock group “Khardyy”. The film opens with a disclaimer stating that it was filmed at temperatures below -50 degrees Celsius and therefore the authors ask not to judge them harshly. But neither this warning, nor the ingenuous synopsis (the main character returns to his native village after twenty years of absence and realizes that no one is waiting for him there) can prepare for that hallucinogenic trip into which Vasily’s (Albert Alekseev) attempt to fall to the roots turns, although of all the mind-altering substances, only vodka is used here, which is washed down with Coca-Cola.

This pilgrimage involves former classmates, policemen, stokers, a saleswoman in the only village store, a touring magician, and even the director himself, who appears on the screen of an old TV in the role of a certain Dmitry advertising a wig store and snowdrop tincture. The same TV shows a Yakut film about Dracula, which becomes an occasion for a funny discussion about regional cinema. However, all the most interesting remains behind the scenes, and we can only guess what is happening there, according to the reaction of the characters, which is not so easy to decipher. In general, Molodist cannot be called Davydov’s success, but the fact that he does not seek to stay too long in the creative comfort zone causes a certain respect.