Hindi Rusi bhai bhai – Weekend
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“Vacation in October” is being released, the fourth full-length film by Roman Mikhailov, yesterday’s debutant, who over the course of a year and a half managed to win over not only critics and festival curators, but also ordinary viewers. It’s high time to talk about the methods of this author.
Two young St. Petersburg actresses Masha and Anya (Maria Matsel and Anna Zavtur) live the dream of breaking into big show business, but for now they are interrupted by small episodes in TV series about cops. They get bored on the set from stupid scripts, listen to complaints from not particularly gentle and very hasty directors. Life is boring until a unique opportunity opens up: some shady producers are recruiting performers for a secret international project, which is being filmed by an Indian director. The girls are packing their bags to go conquer Bollywood. But the first filming, as it turns out, should take place in Russia, in a strange hotel or tourist center. Anya breaks down at the last moment (a reasonable decision), and Masha is left alone in a whirlpool of strange events.
These shootings – the Indian master works using the method of the legendary project “Dau” – are not at all similar to those in which she has ever participated. Gradually, she is immersed in a game started by her fellow actors suffering from boredom. When filming stops – and this is a frequent occurrence on a chaotic set – the actors gather in the cinema hall to watch an unknown Soviet melodrama from the seventies. The title of the films – “Vacation in October” – is suspiciously similar to the once banned Lenfilm masterpiece of Vitaly Melnikov, but there is neither Oleg Dal nor Alexander Vampilov’s dialogues in this film – only boring production-family showdowns of sad Soviet people and some talk about reprimands, trips and bonuses, dates with his mistress and inescapable, unaccountable sadness. Spectator-actors try to discover the magic of cinema in these scenes and for some reason reproduce what they saw in the realities available to them.
This review is the first appearance of Roman Mikhailov as a film director on the pages of this publication (as a theater author, we wrote about him, for example, Here). Meanwhile, over the past year and a half, the author from St. Petersburg has done a lot to attract the attention of those who seriously watch Russian cinema. Let’s start with the fact that this is his fourth full-length work in the reporting period. Until February 2022, when the premiere of Roman Mikhailov’s first film “A Tale for the Old” took place at the Spirit of Fire debut festival in Khanty-Mansiysk, he was a mathematician (Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences), writer, theater director and even a street juggler. Since February 2022, he has also become a film director.
Without paying much attention to the vain fame generated by his debut, Mikhailov released two more films almost in a row – the religious detective melodrama “Snow, Sister and Wolverine” and “Legacy”, which premiered at the Alexander Sokurov Foundation festival “Example of Intonation” in June this of the year. And already in August at the international film festival in Vyborg, the main competition was “Vacation in October”. Perhaps his most technically complex work to date. However, Roman Mikhailov does not stop – the finished film “Let’s go with you to Macau” is awaiting its fate; “The Firebird” is being filmed. There are probably several other projects in various stages of development.
The pace, as we see, is dangerously Fassbinderian, the principle of work is also similar: Mikhailov has a constant group of associates around him, all his films are shot quickly, the budgets are modest, which does not prevent him from attracting Russian stars of the first magnitude. The director’s obligatory companions are Fyodor Lavrov, Evgeny Tkachuk and Kirill Polukhin (who first appeared in “A Tale for Old People”), and then there were Yulia Marchenko, Vitaly Kovalenko, Oleg Chugunov, Maria Matsel and many, many others. The list of performers in “Vacation in October” can be read as a kind of guide to theatrical St. Petersburg. Anna Zavtur, Gennady Blinov, and Oleg Ryazantsev joined Mikhailov’s circle. An anecdotal inclusion is from one of our main film stars of recent times – Yura Borisov, who plays here the role of an actor who played the main role, but escaped. It seems that Borisov simply stopped by to shoot with one of his friends and so, out of friendship, ended up in the frame with a bicycle. Similar cameos of varying degrees of coarseness are part of Mikhailov’s method. Here he has rappers, choreographers, scientists, and writers (each viewer has the right to recognize his favorites on his own) – in this the method and subject of the story are also close to “Dau”. Mikhailov, like Khrzhanovsky, is not averse to looking for the strange, painful and truthful in cinema. But his approach is, perhaps, of a different kind – he is not mechanical. He is more of a guru and priest, trying to look beyond the lining of existence, than an engineer and manager of a major art project. Not an architect-builder, but a mathematician-philosopher.
“Vacation in October” was made on a drive, it was filmed in difficult conditions, and the plot and locations were adjusted by the announced mobilization. It’s amazing that the film has a beginning, middle and end. This magical and mystical story about dreams, other dimensions and lives, the metaphysics of the carpet and the mystery of the Soviet legacy has a completely transparent solution (in the spirit of Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”). The viewer is actually given a choice: to look for her, carefully peering into the details, or simply to lie freely on a mat woven by the director and his co-authors, enjoying endless musical numbers – here you have hip-hop, disco, and a lyrical song-guess about a girl who is confused in their own ideas about the universe. What Mikhailov definitely did with his “Holiday in October” was to show that he had long ago gained the form for the largest and most complex works, and in the future he will inevitably have to be watched even by those who do not closely follow the fate of Russian cinema.
In theaters from October 26
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