Comedy of one position – Weekend – Kommersant
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The deepest master of Soviet comedy, Georgy Danelia, destroys this genre from film to film, doing something unnatural with it. It’s not about breaking the narrative or stylistic canons – this is always good for the genre. Danelia works against the very nature of comedy.
Comedy provides relaxation, resolves issues that torment man and society with laughter. Her younger sister, tragicomedy, combines relaxation with catharsis – the cleansing of pain. Formally, Danelia’s films are closest to this genre. Soviet cinema mastered this cross perfectly: Klimov’s Adventures of a Dentist, Panfilov’s The Beginning, Muratova’s Long Farewell, Melnikov’s Elder Son, Mikhalkov’s Relatives. “Do not Cry!”, Danelia’s last film of the 1960s, fits well into this series of beautiful tragicomedies, but his main things clearly have no place here. They do not promise relaxation either with a smile or with tears, they accumulate tension, do not let it go out.
There are two modes of relationship between a great author and an epoch. The first is to feel her nerve, to be the instrument on which she plays her melody; this is the path of youth, such is the Danelia of the 1960s. The second is to own it as a material, know its texture and sculpt something from it at your discretion. This is how it becomes in the 1970s. Although he made “I’m walking around Moscow” – one of the main thaw films about youth – Danelia entered into full force only when his youth was left far behind. In a strange way, the talent of this cheerful person required a sense of a lost life, clearly resonated with the heavy air of stagnation. He learned to really joke where jokes won’t help much. Purified from the therapeutic function, wit became pure in its desperate brilliance.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Danelia shoots five masterpieces in a row. “Afonya”, “Mimino”, “Autumn Marathon”, “Tears dripped”, “Kin-dza-dza!” differ in background – geographical and social, in intonation, but are similar in their structure, movement. They cause the same reaction: as if you, no longer a child, are getting off the carousel tipsy and with a slight feeling of nausea.
Danelia here and there scatters hints that his films are a cycle, that they are all variations of one theme, one figure (for example, from picture to picture, Leonov out of place drags out his “On the river, on the river, on that shore …”). This figure is a circle. Five films – five circles – probably still not hell, but purgatory (this world is too faded for hell, and it is not clear what sins are expiated here), five journeys through the space of languishing mata. Maeta is covered with alcoholic fervor in Athos, Caucasian joviality in Mimino, a fabulous haze in Tears were dripping, fantastic foolishness in Kin-dza-dze!; only in the “Autumn Marathon” is it given in its pure, unadulterated form.
A person runs in a circle, and everything is inscribed in this circle – his love, family, work, fun. He moves, as if in hypnosis, from hack to hack, from bottle to bottle, from woman to woman, from failure to failure, from one unnecessary victory to another, from scandal to reconciliation and back. Someone, like the weak-willed intellectual Buzykin, is absolutely submissive to the movement. Those less prone to paralyzing reflection try to escape: the plumber Afonya – from the city to the village, the pilot Mimino – from the village to the city. Centrifugal acceleration is balanced by centripetal and only adds shaking, the escape is part of the attraction. Someone manages to make friends in this aimless lace, someone loses all human ties. In any case, the action comes back to where it started. Even “Mimino”, the most good-natured of these paintings, ends with a padlock on a helicopter wheel. If the nightmarish crisis is over, as in the finale of Tears, it is clear that the tormenting tension is starting to build up again. If a promise dawns—as in the eyes of Simonova in the last shots of Afonya—it evokes the same melancholy: no other route is given, and hope is only preparing the next cycle.
The feeling of mediocre looping time grew well on the basis of stagnation, and Danelia settled in this stuck temporality better than any of his contemporaries. But his films do not look like documents of the era, they are too accurate. This terrible feeling is familiar to many: your life, with all its spiritual movements, with all its habits and passions, does not belong to you. She is a mechanism launched once by some force, and you are her obedient observer. The presence of someone else’s, in the most literal sense, terrible power materializes in the figures of trolls, sarcastically dancing in the interludes of the picture “Tears dripped” – perhaps not the strongest, but the most polished, aesthetically perfect film by Danelia.
To feel this alienation from oneself requires a certain subtlety. Danelia’s characters always see their position, they are deep – even the most ridiculous of them, and therefore evoke sympathy (this distinguishes them from Ryazanov’s heroes – thoughtless and violent slaves of those stupid situations into which fate threw them). To describe this run, great precision is needed, and in Danelia’s films there is a rhythm calculated to the second. They paralyze you like the gait of absurd rock, and Kancheli’s creaky music perfectly measures the beat (here – again – the contrast with the viscosity of Ryazanov’s comedies). To survive in it, you need laughter. But this is laughter, similar to a chill, a spasm – when you try to get comfortable in an uncomfortable, frost-bitten room and you yourself are funny from these attempts. Crushed by the Soviet whirlwind, the Dane in the “Marathon” exactly choked out this feeling in the winged “we sit well.”
In Danelia’s pinnacle film, Kin-dza-dze!, the whirlwind reaches cosmic proportions. The Universe is a huge sad attraction, a rusty ritornello, in which everyone has a long-defined role, but if the boys and chatlians suddenly change places, nothing will change from this, and the cosmos will announce the same mournful “y-ku-y-ku-s “. For all its baroque excess, “Kin-dza-dza!” makes transparent the stoic philosophy of Danelia. The space of his films is a bit like a Francis Bacon painting: as if a creature trapped in a cage experiences the unbearable pressure of a delusional world, and in response develops a hypertrophied, almost ugly muscle of wit. Not because it will save him, but because it is a natural, the only possible reaction of the body.
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