Cinema on weekends. Chuk and Huck to the rescue

New Year’s trip to Happiness. The legendary heroes of our childhood, the brothers Chuk and Gek, were out of touch with the modern cinema community. The reviews are mostly negative – terrible, implausible, huge inconsistencies, it was not worth embarrassing, well, nonsense. We are talking about the new film “Chuk and Gek. Big Adventure”.

Genre – fairy tale, adventure, family film. Directed by Alexander Kott. Producer Arsen Gottlieb. Script writers Vladimir Arkusha, Denis Chervyakov.

There are also positive reviews, but both of them are somehow superficial. From such texts breathes order. We would not be sure if the information about the new film was blocked by information about other films with a completely different target audience, and even the 1953 film adaptation, made strictly according to the story of Arkady Gaidar.

One adequate review was nevertheless found, and with exhaustive analytics. Thanks to the author – Ekaterina Alekseeva, InterMedia (https://dzen.ru/a/Y5xoHu4byCm1iWxG)

Indeed, the childhood of the author of the story “Chuk and Gek” Arkady Gaidar (Golikov) ended at the age of twelve. At sixteen he already commanded a regiment. The consequences of the wounds forced him to end his military career, after which Gaidar became the originator of a special genre of Soviet children’s literature.

Perhaps it was a return to an unlived childhood.

Heroes of Gaidar created models of behavior of Soviet children actually until the seventies, when changes in mentality entered a sharp turn, incompatible with the past.

In this sense, Gaidar’s work became a logical development of Tolstoy’s children’s stories.

You have to imagine that time. It was quite scary by the standards of even the nineties. A series of revolutions, the Civil War, devastation and the natural loss of adequate norms of behavior for acute living conditions, sexual promiscuity, a wave of suicides, the peak of the crisis of the institutions of the family and childhood, the malice of the microsocial environment.

The young Soviet authorities solved their problems as best they could in the fight against their own aggressive dilettantism and, in general, against Ashby’s law in cybernetics about the power of control in conditions of chaotic behavior. Propaganda glorified the image of the pioneer-avenger Pavlik Morozov, who, in his irreconcilable hatred of his own father, is similar to our contemporary Greta Thunberg with her hatred of all mankind.

We do not know that the writer Gaidar was authorized by anyone to create literary images of model characters – husband and father, wife and mother, children, family as a whole. Unlike Tolstoy, there is no mentoring push towards the ideal here. Heroes of Gaidar had to strive for honesty, and this quality in itself was an ideal.

In any case, it is obvious that Gaidar solved the state task with his creativity, found the only true way, bypassing propaganda and mentoring.

As we have repeatedly written, by the centenary of the USSR, Homo soveticus was reborn from the ashes of perestroika. The leadership of Russia, independent of itself, going crazy from its own courage and trying not to face the truth, was confronted by history itself with a fact: it is necessary to return the upbringing of normal human relations in the family and society with adequate gender and age roles, to bring Gaidar’s models to life. Yes, even on such a scale, which was unthinkable in Soviet times.

For thirty post-Soviet years, it was possible to learn that the words “pioneer”, “communist” can no longer be erased from our consciousness. It is possible to stigmatize, but the effect can be the opposite. In the film, the pioneer tie, combined with the light of a flashlight, scares away the wolves.

You won’t be weakly sweet, but we don’t need to. The film Chuk and Gek. Big Adventure” was released on December 22 and became a kind of result of 2022. It turned out in tune with the paradoxical data of VTsIOM. Such historical moments in Russian history, explicit or unconscious, when suddenly a feeling of national self-sufficiency comes

Let the historians of the humanitarian spill argue whether the Battle of Kulikovo was and how real the Battle of the Ice is, what is the point of standing on the Ugra. All these are manifestations of a massacre in a contradictory national mentality, and thanks to it, the thousand-year-old Russian statehood is being reproduced through historical gaps.

Gaidar’s story “Chuk and Gek” was first published in 1939. In 1953, it was filmed in the author’s version. The plot is simple: the wife of a geologist with two sons goes on New Year’s Eve to dad in a geological exploration party, which is being transferred to the Far East.

The new film “Chuk and Gek. The Great Adventure is based on Gaidar’s story.

The authors made the children older and sent them to look for mom and dad in the taiga. Modern children in the cinema perceived the development of the plot on the screen with genuine interest. They understand the language of the computer game quest.

The entourage is real and fabulous at the same time. Station “Taiga”, the base of the geological party “Happiness-1”.

The party did not find molybdenum and was sent to the Far East by the decision of Moscow. Moving towards each other, the head of the expedition Seregin (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) and his family – wife Marusya (Yulia Snigir), children Chuk (Andrey Andreev) and Gek (Yuri Stepanov) – missed each other. The watchman of the Happiness base (Anatoly Popov) goes to catch up with the geologists, but falls into the clutches of a predator and returns with difficulty. Marusya starts to catch up with her husband and passes by the lodge, where they spend the night on the way to the Taiga station.

Marusya returns, but there are no children. They left to look for their mother.

The coachman (Alexander Samoylenko) did not want to take Marusya with the children to the base of geologists, but they still had to deliver the telegram. As it turned out, a telegram to Marusya about the date of arrival in “Taiga”.

The story contains many absurdities. A dream with animated toys leaves marks on the way. The character of the dream becomes the Mistress of the Copper Mountain Pavel Bazhov (Milena Sofronova).

In the course of the play, wolves, a bear, and a crossing over a rotten log come into play. The quest was overcome thanks to the algorithms of the watchman of the Happiness base. There is a teaching nature.

As befits a fairy tale, the action ends with the New Year’s chime of the Spasskaya Tower. The time difference does not play a role, a fairy tale.

The main thing is that the children found a rock sample with molybdenum veins, and the exploration party can stay at the base, it is enough to tap the Morse code to Moscow about the find.

The gift of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain is part of the author’s intention of the filmmakers. Reflects the trend of the times, children can sometimes more than adults.

The authors of the film combined techniques available to modern children with the surroundings of the Gaidar era. The Seregins family was moved to a communal apartment opposite the Kremlin, where they added neighbors – an unkind woman (Natalia Kolyakanova) and a kind man (Igor Pismenny). Marusya was made a pop singer. She sings in the voice of Valeria Lanskaya.

Chuck and Huck were swapped.

The images of the characters in the film, the interiors of the lodge and the geological base “Happiness-1”, winter landscapes were noticeably affected by the drawings for the Soviet edition of the story, republished in an authentic edition in 2007.

In Ivan Lukinsky’s 1953 black-and-white film, the characters look more realistic and mundane. At that time, meeting loved ones was enough to feel the holiday. This alone was a fairy tale. The role of mother was played by the unforgettable Vera Vasilyeva.

The story “Chuk and Gek” is about three dozen pages (46.5 thousand characters). It is read in less than an hour, the film is one and a half times longer (96 minutes).

In that part of the plot that does not contradict the creative intent of the filmmakers, they simply transferred the native text to the screen.

The combination of associations from the past, the images of Gaidar and Bazhov with their modern perception came out not eclectic, but organic. The combination of markers from different eras in the life of the country has become a universal device of the new Russian cinema. In an accessible concentrated form, a camera obscura of Russian culture is built from a historical perspective.

Contrary to the political attempts of some reviewers, there is no embellishment in the style of “Oh, it’s good to live in a Soviet country!” Quite the contrary, given the special attitude of the Soviet authorities to exploration and the growth of reserves as a strategic industry. Life, like everyone else. Room for a family in a communal apartment. Mom in the film received the name “Marusya”.

A significant influence on the audience’s perception of the film is played by the toys of the Gaidar era that come to life. For children, the roles of toys become the main ones – a clockwork hare-drummer, an enamel horseman-bearer, a truck, mother’s doll-talisman.

Gaidar is one of the most talented writers in the history of literature. He writes so simply that it seems to the reader that he wrote it himself. Such a reading effect is a diagnostic sign of writing talent.

There is another sign. Childish intransigence of reviews, transferred from the story to the film. This effect clearly indicates success. The better the film, the more striking is the intransigence of its perception. Don’t expect fairness here. This is a classic of the genre. We are different, some need a narcotic hype, others prefer a bright fairy tale. We do not always remain silent under the pressure of all kinds of verbal extreme.

On the turns of history, someone always loses his social niche and the more hysterically he achieves something from those whose suffering he ate.

Gaidar managed to find and formulate the invariant radical of the child’s image in the Hegelian dialectic of the unity and struggle of the opposites of the young age of personality formation – collectivism, individualism, irreconcilability and sweet dependence on the native family environment, which is immanently connected with childhood.

For adult characters, toys left in the snow become markers in search of each other, like signs of a mine surveyor.

The collection of literary processed Ural tales by Pavel Bazhov “The Malachite Box” was published three years earlier than the story “Chuk and Gek”, its heroes read this book.

The filmmakers used computer graphics, diagrams against the backdrop of scenery in the pavilions of Mosfilm and location shooting in the Perm region near Kosva (Gubakhsky district in the center of Kuzbass).

The film ends with a song, the text of which is the key to the plot:

“How boring it is to live without a bright fairy tale With only one cold in the chest, Without a seductive denouement. No hopes, no hopes ahead. How poor life is without hobbies, How life without exploits is dead And without lofty renunciations The soul is like a temple, the soul is like a temple without a deity. How boring it is to live without a bright fairy tale With only one cold in the chest, Without a seductive denouement, Without hopes ahead. How poor life is without hobbies, How life without deeds is dead. And without lofty renunciations the Soul is like a temple without a deity. How poor life is without hobbies, How life without exploits is dead And without lofty renunciations The soul is like a temple without a deity. How boring it is to live without a bright fairy tale, How boring to live without a bright fairy tale … “

Source: https://tekst-pesni.online/kruiz-skuchno-zhit-bez-svetloj-skazki/

Natalia Vakurova, Lev MOSKOVKIN.