Daria Moroz made a series about sex

And received a lot of criticism

Series “Sex. Before and After” became Daria Moroz’s directorial debut and, of course, marked the actress’s new status. The heir to a significant director’s family is clearly building an empire in her own name, specializing in a special type of serial drama. And many are already trying to assess Daria’s chances of success.

For Moroz, the director’s chair on the set of “Sex. Before and after” is not a spontaneous whim, but rather a logical stage. Three years ago, Daria not only returned to the second season of “Kept Women” as an actress, but also acted as a producer. Having repeated this experience in the short film “Get ready, let’s go on holiday” and the series “Living Life,” Daria apparently realized that she had studied dramas about relationships well and could now take on the project as a director and showrunner.

We can say that “Sex. Before and After” smoothly follows from “Kept Women” and “Living Life”, series where people who do not complain about a lack of funds experience an acute lack of love and sincere emotions. Such projects provide the gloss of a big city, calculated psychoanalysis interspersed with nervous breakdowns and intimate scenes that are more reminiscent of combat.

In terms of intimacy, “Sex. Before and After,” despite the title, the series is not exactly free-spirited. It begins with a hot scene with the participation of Daria Moroz herself, who plays the administrator of the Ice and Flame bar, where people come not so much for cocktails as for a high-society shoot or for the desire to sort things out. As other characters fill the frame, conversations come to the fore, and they revolve mainly around the longing for great love.

Such a plot, as well as the methods of its visualization, appears in films and TV series so often that it seems as if the audience understands everything in the very first minutes of the action. Daria Moroz herself probably understands this too, so she tried to put win-win moves together and make what was happening on the screen as catchy as possible for the public’s attention.

As a result, there is an impressive team of actors of different generations (from Igor Mirkurbanov and Gosha Kutsenko to Oleg Gaas and Pavel Chinarev), a spectacular fashion show of film beauties is presented (from Marina Alexandrova and Anna Snatkina to Svetlana Ivanova and Elena Podkaminskaya), a number of characters in the spirit of “I wish remember everyone,” and all this fits into an episode with a maximum running time of half an hour. The result was fourteen short stories, in which the revelation of characters and the display of bodies are very closely intertwined with each other.

Daria Moroz, as a director, tried to make the project as cinematic as possible. Long takes, leisurely editing, an emphasis on dialogue rather than vigorous presentation of it, in general, methods that are loved in independent cinema. True, in a serial format it is difficult to attach due importance to all this. Most of our TV series are watched clearly not for the sake of directing, and for those who are used to getting acquainted with new products using a gadget, unusual visual solutions are not needed at all, they simply cannot be seen on the screen of a mobile device.

However, critics have clearly considered a lot and have already given out compliments for the exciting development of events and reproaches for trampling on the same plots and profanation of the director’s profession. If you try to choose a middle ground in your assessment, then this series may interest you while you watch it, which is already a kind of achievement. However, the project is not yet in danger of becoming an industry event.

In any case, the famous actress began to master another, this time family, profession, and in her debut she put everything she knew about the genre, which “Kept Women” made into a real mainstream. Directors who come from actors are often and rightly criticized, but in a strategic sense, their decision not only to act, but also to film, can be called the right career calculation. In cinema, in general, everything needs to be done according to calculation, even if we are talking about love.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29152 dated November 8, 2023

Newspaper headline:
“About This” with Daria Moroz