From the cinema of milk – Newspaper Kommersant No. 210 (7411) of 11/14/2022

Eduard Zholnin’s full-length directorial debut Zemun was released, which premiered in 2021 at the Window to Europe film festival in Vyborg. The authors call their film a mystical neo-western, and indeed it intertwines the traditions of American genre and Russian auteur cinema. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

The unusual title of the film refers to the beliefs of the ancient Slavs and immediately sets you up for the fact that realism should not be expected here. According to them, the sacred heavenly cow Zemun was the patroness of shepherds, as well as lost travelers, whom she helped to return to the true and true path. Yegor (Evgeny Tkachuk) is just such a traveler. In the past, he left his native village and five years in prison, in the present – life in a big city, where he clearly does not feel at home, and work in a car service, from where he is fired for a criminal past in the very first minutes of the film, the future does not seem promising. Almost simultaneously with the news of the dismissal, Yegor receives a call from home, from Pashka’s younger brother (Ivan Reshetnyak), who reports the death of their father.

Arriving in the village along a broken road leading from nowhere to nowhere (the film was shot in the Voronezh region, but the action takes place in a certain conventional space), Yegor discovers that it is almost empty. Among the few inhabitants left here are the elderly sorceress Varvara (Tatiana Sezonenko), who prepares the deceased for burial and tells the hero the legend about the cow Zemun, the shepherd Vlas (Vyacheslav Garder), who lost his herd and almost lost his mind, a strange mute girl (Ekaterina Shumakova), who stays as as if on the verge between our world and the other world, and the stubborn Pashka, who continues to hold on to a herd of eighty heads and a plot of land bequeathed by his father to both brothers. Egor believes that cows and land should be sold, and with the money received, return to seek his fortune in Moscow. Moreover, there is also a buyer offering a favorable price – the owner of the nearby quarry Gleb (Oleg Yagodin), who has connections in the local administration and keeps the entire district in bondage to credit. In the wings, he has a gang of strong young guys, led by a former classmate and friend of Yegor (Nikita Kostyukevich), who becomes his enemy.

The collision with the confrontation between honest villagers and the cunning city moneybags (of course, the cows did not give up to Gleb at all, and the land is much more expensive than he offers for it) is quite a genre, evoking the plots of classic westerns in which poor settlers refused to give up their plots entrepreneurs who know that soon a railway will be laid through them. The landscape in Zholnin’s film is also appropriate: a scorched steppe under a faded pale blue sky, bald hills on the horizon, half-abandoned cemeteries with lopsided crosses and farms standing on the outskirts, surrounded by fences made of stakes. There will be chases here (only not on horseback, but on motorcycles), and shootouts, and dialogues in which every word sounds simple and weighty at the same time.

But the longer Egor stays in the village, the more he realizes his attachment to this hard land, unkind to either his own or others, the more the film moves from the genre plane to the metaphorical one. Reality becomes unsteady, merging with memories and dreams, opening up the opportunity to look into the past and the future at the same time – either the present or dreamed. A great merit in visualizing these almost imperceptible transitions between reality and imagination belongs to the cameraman Maxim Efros, who can safely be called a co-author of the film. And a simple story about the struggle for a piece of land turns into an occasion to reflect on the debts of fathers who are inherited by their sons, about the guilt of man in front of nature, which he destroys, but from which he himself seeks solace in moments of weakness, and about the roots, to refuse which, according to the philosophy of the film, means to abandon oneself.