Escort City – Weekend – Kommersant
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After the premiere at the MIFF, “Kat” is released, the second film by Boris Akopov, who won “Bull” at the Kinotavr several years ago with his debut. That film was about gangsters from the nineties, this one is about a late-Putin-era sex worker.
The girl Kat is feverishly rushing about at night in Moscow with a feverish baby. Muddy Alik on an expensive “bomb” promises to take her to a doctor he knows, who will “pat up” the baby. Another would, having assessed the vocabulary and the degree of drug intoxication, would get out of the car, but Kat has nowhere to go: she is a sex worker, and Alik is her pimp. And yet, as it turns out, not the most cruel – at first he let her go on maternity leave, and now she is being taken to the doctor. However, Alik’s patience is running out. Capitalism is taking over. The baby is almost a year old, and it’s time for Kat to return to duty in order to work out the master’s mercy.
Tomorrow night there will be a party with some officials and bon vivants, then going to the theater, and then another party. The life of a demimonde lady is still a conveyor belt, but there are no more options. The father of the child, a singer and conqueror of women’s hearts by the name of Maisky, rigidly puts Kat in the framework – he has long been married to his producer. And the photographer Maxim, who accidentally came to hand, seems to be suitable for suitors and a good guy, but in an affair with Kat he sees only a way to take his soul away – to put a hated father in his place. Other males are even worse – they only want sex and attention, often finding themselves paying even according to the price list. None of them are Richard Gere, and Kat’s life is unlike the movie Pretty Woman.
The second film by Boris Akopov, following the successful Bull, which won the main prize of the Kinotavr, was clearly made by an ambitious man, but this time he decided to hide his ambitions to hell. The author of “Kat” does not set himself super-tasks. The Bull, for all its flaws, was the first attempt at a story about the nineties from the point of view of the children of the nineties, a kind of historical fresco. “Kat” is deliberately simpler. By genre, this is a snapshot, a physiological essay: not a portrait of a young escort against the backdrop of a big city (although the image of the debutante Anastasia Kuvshinova turned out to be bright), but rather a big city seen through the eyes of the main character.
Moscow – bustling, rich, hypocritical, proud – shimmers in this film with gasoline asphalt and mirrored shop windows, sparkles with ruthless night lamps and marker red lights, pulsates with a fashionable electronic soundtrack in the spirit of Cliff Martinez (in “Bull” Akopov’s composer Anton Bulle worked in a similar way, but there the music did not permeate the film through and through, as happened with “Kat”). There are many bright, eye-catching details. A wide-angle lens is trying to absorb the world of Moscow trade entirely and without a trace. The camera will either look at an entertaining fight in the mud – two naked girls knead each other in a children’s rubber pool inflated for a party – then stop in front of a ballerina dancing Giselle on the stage of the Bolshoi, then admire the sacrament of baptism. In Moscow, Akopov has a lot of alluring, catchy, tediously addictive. Although it is worth noting that not all aspects of life are subject to close directorial attention: Akopov manages to shoot bohemian-bourgeois parties with subdued lights better than conditional rallies that are dispersed by the police. And he has a slightly better idea about the whims of intelligent millionaires than about the life of military pensioners.
While claiming to be all-encompassing, Kat’s narrative is predictably fragmented. It is entirely subordinated to the throwing of the main character, who flies from one man to another through the cold metropolitan landscapes. The performers of episodic roles do their work quickly: he is beautiful in the role of a daring singer with the concert program “Ah, life!” Nikolai Schreiber, who accurately played the crippled military man Aleksey Oshurkov, is redundant Grigory Bagrov, who got the party of an almost Gogolian official, Dmitry Kartashov adequately plays the child-loving bastard pimp. Akopov works great with actors. There are no complaints about the dialogues, the work of the cameraman Pyotr Buslov, the music or the editing, but some sad residue of imperfection after watching “Kat” is clearly distinguishable. And it’s not about the dangling ending. Are there many stories where the author prefers to retire before the denouement? The fact is that the author, it seems, has not decided who he sympathizes with here, and who he is simply dragging to the final act.
Akopov seems to be afraid to speak out. You involuntarily think: does the author condemn his heroine? It seems to be not. There is hardly any reason to think so. At least until the taxi driver, who decides to tell Kat about the difficult fate after graduate school and pregnancy, after learning that she has a prostitute in the back seat, suddenly falls silent with meaning. At least until the hit punk band N.O.J. hits the credits: “I’m beautiful enough and stupid enough to be your star.”
In theaters from 15 September
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