I’m not tired, but I’m leaving – Weekend

Roman Polanski’s “The Palace” is being released in Russia. The New Year’s skit of the 90-year-old classic is made according to all the laws of the genre: a crowd of favorite artists in carnival outfits and at the peak of their comedic form is bursting with enthusiasm, but exchanges it for flat witticisms, increasingly obscene as they approach the final morning hangover. Alexey Vasiliev recalls the era of great revelry and understands why it was in the scenery of the New Year – 2000 that Polanski decided to say goodbye to cinema.

In the Swiss Alps there is a place called Gstaad, famous for its ski resort, the villa where Kandinsky’s widow was strangled, and the huge Palace Hotel, Le Palace, where in earlier, more elegant times, Prince Charles, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, Margaret Thatcher liked to hang out . And Roman Polanski, who has been an exile in Hollywood for half a century now, prefers this to all other European havens. Small, disheveled and nimble, the director of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” still gives the impression of being lively. However, you can’t joke with a passport, and the passport states that Polanski is 90 years old: the age when it would be appropriate to draw up a will, and in the case of a great artist, which Polanski certainly is, to share with his descendants some main wisdom and, if lucky, joy what life has taught me.

Another director with the same impeccable cinematic seam as Polanski’s, Kubrick, made the very last word in his very last film (“Eyes Wide Shut”, 1999) the word “fuck” – the first beauty of the time, Nicole Kidman, answered a question from her then husband Tom Cruise, who, however, also worried Chernyshevsky: “What to do?” And although the film turned out so-so, it taught a useful lesson.

Polanski also had a gift in store: celebrating the New Year in a millionaire’s multi-storey chalet. And not just any year, but 2000. And the point here is not the change of century, not the magic of zeroing, which worries many guests in the film in different ways. More importantly, the end of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s were one of the most spectacular sprees in the history of the 20th century, when disco made an upgrade, people, despite AIDS, showed a keen interest in each other, Lamborghini painted a new model bright orange, the porn industry began to gain momentum again, and most importantly, no one dried out, and if a hangover provoked hysteria, it was only fashionable – and the fashion of that time today is suitable only for figure skaters and circus gymnasts. Of all the previous sprees, this one also seemed the most harmless – because it did not end with a world war, like the Belle Epoch, or the advent of Nazism, like the Weimar Republic, or barricades in Paris and tanks in Prague, like the general fraternization and economic boom of the 1960s, or the nuclear confrontation that scared the hell out of the world and followed the decade of Boogie Nights.

So it seemed to us then. How much the world has shrunk after that spree of ours, you yourself now see very well. The first of our favorite toys that was literally snatched from our mouths was a cigarette – an accessory that the characters in “The Palace” simply cannot perform without. The anti-smoking crusade began after the events of September 11th. Although Polanski seems to see a different trigger date, judging by how persistently he introduces into the film the televised address of Boris Yeltsin, who was relinquishing his powers. The New Year’s greeting from 47-year-old Vladimir Putin was removed from the Russian theatrical version – although I personally don’t understand why. The film very sarcastically shows the contrast between the dull folklore dances of New Year’s Swiss television – and our sensational holiday program, where the old president abdicates under garlands and Christmas trees, and a new one appears at the sound of the chimes. O. Next, if anyone remembers, came Pugacheva with the number “Again we will sin and repent, we will again play roulette with fate – this means that life goes on, which means the blue ball is spinning.” New Year’s “Ogonyok” is good when it is unexpected, explosive, when superstars, who cannot be imagined in one frame, pass the baton to each other for a truly impending change, and do not just tear a leaf from the calendar.

There are plenty of superstars in Polanski’s film – precisely those who have never crossed paths. And they were given an excellent start – the director himself, obviously, enjoys the most complex five-minute waltzing shot without a single cut, in which there is not even a shadow of narcissism, and the viewer at every second sees exactly what is necessary to catch the essence – one of those ideal complex plans , which brought Polanski the fame of a great film storyteller. And on the screen – the bartender wipes glasses and exchanges the first, very encouraging, routine witticisms with visitors, the counter sparkles with bottles of 12 thousand francs, and celebrities from completely different operas and in completely unimaginable makeup designs climb onto the bar stools: for example, Fanny Ardant with an afro hairstyle and post-hippie clothes, reminiscent of Diana Ross, who stole a stage costume from Jane Birkin and ran off to drink in it; or Mickey Rourke in an Andy Warhol wig, which gave him a resemblance to our famous TV comedian of the period described and a regular at Ogonki, Efim Shifrin.

Still, those who worked a lot on television in the 1970s, in the golden era of such “Ogonki”, holiday programs, feel the most actorly, organically, like fish in water, in this atmosphere of the upcoming New Year’s special “Zucchini “13 Chairs””. revue Among them is one of the creators and stars of the main English comedy television show of all time, Monty Python, John Cleese in the role of a 97-year-old oil tycoon who married a 22-year-old pink pig (a thick hint at the then marriage of portly Anna Nicole Smith to a 90-year-old ‍a year-old millionaire who died a year after his wedding). Cleese is especially successful in the role of a corpse: his hero dies during sex (an allusion also to the then sex thrillers like “Basic Instinct” and “Body as Evidence”) with the smile of a happy idiot, with which and they drag him through elevators, with a cigar in his numb lips, throughout the film, passing him off as alive.

Another such star of the film is the most beautiful television aunt of the 1970s and 1980s, Sydney Rom. This green-eyed blonde with straw curls drove Soviet high school students crazy, belting out endless verses of the ballad “Hearts Can Break” in a sugar-husky voice in clown trousers against the backdrop of multi-colored electronic breaking hearts. This is in the morning, in the program “Good Morning!” And in the evening she appeared in the image of a progressive journalist, the wife of John Reed, in the seven-episode “Red Bells” by Sergei Bondarchuk. She also taught aerobics lessons on television and ate the dog at such New Year’s divertissements, skillfully fitting into any dialogue, making Julio Iglesias’s narcissism laugh out loud with her grimaces, so that he, acting out a scene with her, didn’t even suspect it. In Polanski, 77-year-old Rom resurrects these skills, standing on a par with such luminaries of Soviet television jokes as Olga Aroseva, the unforgettable Mrs. Monika, or Rina Zelenaya. Polanski, by the way, made Rom a pan-European star, giving her the role of a modern Alice in Sex Wonderland in the comedy “What?” (1972). When the detective story “Haven” came out in 2007, directed by one of the kings of the giallo, Pupi Avati, what scared us most about it was Rom’s face: the actress performed plastic surgery on herself, as if she had gone to the surgeon with a photograph of Jack Nicholson in the image of the Joker and asked: “Do the same for me!” In “The Palace” she plays a victim of plastic surgery, extremely funny, confirming the axiom that a truly great clown laughs most fervently at himself.

In general, there is a lot of plastic in “The Palace” (including in the person of Mickey Rourke). The aristocracy, alas, then degenerated, I remember these beautiful people in scarves, holding champagne with an unsteady hand at breakfast in the Savoy or Hotel de Paris in Berlin.

And also – a lot of Russians! Here the Russians – under the leadership of Alexander Petrov, who are bursting into this world of doctored faces and ridiculous outfits, as we burst in then: with life, health… One English TV presenter, whom I met in those years on a cruise on the Ligurian Sea, said the best thing about us at that time. and along the Cote d’Azur: “When you Russians appeared, you became like a new sperm bank for us. You sit, drink vodka, gloomy and dangerous like a bandit. But then I sit down, put my hand on your shoulder, you turn around, smile, and it’s Brad Pitt!” This is precisely what Petrov portrayed, one to one, with delightful precision.

The main star of the meeting in the “Palace” is the fictional porn actor Bongo Minnetti, star of the films “The Lord of the End”, “Sperminator” and “Confluence” – and here I can’t help but remember 2002, the celebration in the Vienna City Hall, the hall in which I I spotted the bar counter, walked in, and, like Mickey Rourke in Polanski’s film, recognized the penis of my favorite porn actor Jeff Stryker, who graced that party with a live impromptu performance. And this is also a sure sign of that wonderful time around the millennium.

But – alas, after the first 30 minutes, when all the guests are already assembled and presented to the audience and each other in all their glory, all expectations are deceived. The character lines do not develop or intersect in any way, Sydney Rom generally disappears somewhere. However, this also fits well with the law of “Blue Lights”: the authors know that the further after midnight, the more viewers are amused by their own jokes and songs, and not by what is happening on TV, so there is no point in trying too hard anymore. The place of successful reprises in “The Palace” is taken by conceptual statements: while the rich are increasingly lying around drunk or simply dying, Slavic maids and Russian bodyguards clink glasses in a friendly group and sing “Internationale” in chorus. And here Polanski begins to miss the details: “Internationale” and I had the opportunity to sing in Europe, but in the company of the wives of the heads of the Colombian cartels, Lugansk patricians and Bombay film idols. What was different about the time of grand gestures was that everyone mingled with everyone else. Polanski completely in vain began to look further, already in our times, violating the great secret rule of a broad gesture – not to think about tomorrow.

However, to a certain extent, as a director, Polanski turned out to be faithful to this covenant, not thinking at all about the reviews that would follow the morning after the premiere of this skit of his. The Palace already rightfully holds the title of the most hated film of the year. And, it seems to me, a weak script is far from the main reason for this.

In theaters from November 23

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