Clash of a French city and a Spanish village – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
“Predators”, a new film by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, shown out of competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, is being released. .
“Predators” opens with an impressive scene of purely masculine gatherings in a rustic bar. At the table, as if descended from the canvases of Velasquez and Murillo, gloomy peasants, whose skin has been tanned over decades of hard work by the sun and wind, and in their eyes universal sorrow for their ungrateful share. Sorrow, which at any moment can be replaced by bestial rage – for not making white-stone or at least clean farmlands with the labors of the righteous chambers, like the neighbor Antoine (Denis Menoche), who came to their land to grow ecologically impeccable tomatoes. Antoine is a Frenchman, in the past, apparently, a university teacher, who in his declining years thought about the meaning of life. He and his wife (Marina Fois) preferred a rural idyll to boulevard urban culture – but they decided to plant the notorious tree not on their native land, but in the Galician wilderness. Antoine learned the language, learned to drink local mash, eat sheep cheese, planned to while away the evenings playing dominoes with the same nature-loving individuals like him. But nothing came of his noble populist motives: instead of unity with the autochthonous population, there was dramatic interethnic strife. “And what, frog, when did they stop cutting heads on your guillotine?” – mockingly asks one of the drinking companions. “There is a lot to talk about enlightenment, and the savages themselves are even worse,” the others echo him.
From this wordy epigraph, suspiciously reminiscent of the famous breakfast before the “storm” from Reservoir Dogs, a terrible collision starts, the ending of which is easy to predict. We have seen the clash of city and countryside, progress and archaism, man and beast many times on the screen – among the closest examples are Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and, oddly enough, Balabanov’s Cargo 200. For the cruelty of the Predators is rooted in inevitability, hopelessness, and the impossibility of just retribution. And what is justice anyway? Everyone has their own, as well as the truth. The truth is not in wine, but in war, the very, alas, natural state of mankind, look around and you will believe …
Sorogoyen’s previous film Mother, about a woman who has lost her son but refuses to accept the merciless reality, also developed as a genre puzzle, in order to evolve from a nerve-wracking thriller into a hysterical rebuke of existence at the end. Creatures are powerless before existence. Because their essence is animal. Not without reason, among the obvious references of Sorogoyen, paintings constantly appear, already in the title referring to the bestial nature of man: “Reservoir Dogs”, “Straw Dogs”, and finally – not even gold, but platinum classics of the earthly symphony of horror, “Andalusian Dog”. Sorogoyen bows to the shadows of his great compatriot Bunuel at the moment of culmination – the camera captures the convulsing victim, smoothly approaching her face, her open mouth, gradually turning into a bloody pulsating wound.
There are, of course, signs of modernity in Predators: arguments about an allegedly united Europe, about nations as communicating vessels – only one of these vessels is full, and the other is empty. The humanism planted after the World War did not bear fruit. Neither freedom, nor equality, nor brotherhood ascended.
It is also interesting to observe the relationships within the family: after the tragedy, a daughter comes to her mother from distant Paris, emancipated to the point of complete deafness to the feelings of others. The happiness of a woman is in work, and the meaning of her being is in stubborn opposition to trouble. What the daughter considers a disease, the subject of psychoanalysis, the mother understands as strength of mind. Before the “war” was a matter of taste, after that it became a matter of honor. War has not a woman’s face, but an animal grin. So, at any cost, you need to defeat the beast in yourself.
At the box office from February 2
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
