Fatum energy – Newspaper Kommersant No. 44 (7489) of 03/16/2023

At the box office – Igor Voloshin’s film “Medea”. The ancient tragedy of the Colchian princess-killer, the fatal lover of the leader of the Argonauts, Jason, was transferred by the main visionary of Russian cinema to the suburbs of modern St. Petersburg and turned inside out. Mikhail Trofimenkov once again admired the cruel, irrational power of the author of the films Nirvana (2008), Me (2009) and Possessed (2021).

A myth is a myth because everyone who decides to interpret it, as a result, shoots something not only radically authorial, but also radically different from the original source. Moreover, the ancient Greeks themselves were pretty confused in the history of Medea.

Medea Pasolini and Medea von Trier are as dissimilar to each other as Medea, played in their time by the great Melina Mercury and Isabelle Huppert. Just two years ago, Alexander Zeldovich transferred to modern Israel the story of the unfortunate nymphomaniac Medea, played by the Georgian actress Tinatin Dalakishvili: Colchis is, after all, modern Georgia. In the version of Voloshin and screenwriter Vasily Sigarev, the star of the Russian “new drama”, Olga Simonova played the child killer. Her work has become a kind of reverse rhyme to her role in Voloshin’s film “Bedouin” (2011), highly rated at the time by Alexei Balabanov. There Simonova played a woman who goes to save her sick daughter as a surrogate mother.

In all versions of the myth, only the ancient horror of history, crowned with the murder of the princess’s two sons, born by her from the traitor Jason, remains inescapable. A murder that even overshadows other nightmares that fill the tragedy of the unpunished Medea: there is fratricide, and the dismemberment of corpses thrown into the sea, and evil magic, and the murder of a rival using a burning mantle. And so that any version of Medea does not turn on the screen into just fierce trash, speculating on archetypes, one thing is required. The feeling of fate weighing on the heroes and dooming them to act as they do.

And here Igor Voloshin has all the cards in his hands. He is a very cruel director, never at the same time speculating on cruelty for the sake of cheap effects. And he is, most importantly, a director who knows how to make the audience hear the “steps of the commander”, the tread of fate, which does not care what millennium is in the yard. Rock is rock.

Crimean Voloshin is in love with a strange and painful love in St. Petersburg, the most fatal city in Russia. The drug-addicted communal apartments on Nevsky Prospekt opposite the Kazan Cathedral in Nirvana still seemed like an epilogue to Dostoevsky’s “Petersburg text”. But Voloshin found the fatal power of the city even in the most seemingly contradictory places. In Possessed, it was the serpentine curves of the Western High-Speed ​​Diameter and the ghostly Kanonersky Island. In “Medea” – the outlying district of Murino, the kingdom of “humans” of the latest construction, in accordance with the signature Voloshin style, removed from above. But, if you think about it, personifying the hell of life on the outskirts. A life in which anything can happen and no one will hear, no one will know, no one will help.

The red dress of Medea-Lisa, hopelessly drinking red wine, who lives after a divorce from her husband (Pavel Derevyanko) with twin sons Yarik and Misha (Nikita and Kirill Kolpachkov), is the brightest spot in the Murinskaya universe – a target that attracts evil. A certain witch invades her life, posing as her aunt: and what the hell can a girl from an orphanage have an aunt.

The witch speaks wild nonsense about a family curse, about family history – a continuous hecatomb in which cursed children play a fatal role. About some “entities” pursuing Lizina’s family. Lisa should at best run away from her own children. At worst, repeat the villainy of Medea. But Voloshin twists the myth inside out. Liza runs, but runs with the children and in the name of their salvation, which with each new episode of the film seems more and more doubtful.

The notorious “entities”, sometimes reminiscent of the characters of German expressionism, sometimes taking on the guise of either a drunken neighbor in the stairwell, or a handsome doctor, pursue her relentlessly. In a country boarding house, in the woods, in a temporary shelter that Lisa finds in a slum quarter. They break on doors, turn into wolves, spew out streams of obscenity over the phone. The surrounding reality collapses with Voloshin more convincingly than with David Lynch.

It is all the more convincing that, unlike Lynch, he gives his heroes the opportunity to put the world on rewind, shake off the hassle, convince themselves that all this is not true. Pathetically speaking, to give hope, albeit illusory, for a while, until the “essences” return.