It’s good to live in the Soviet taiga – Newspaper Kommersant No. 238 (7439) of 12/22/2022

The film by Alexander Kott “Chuk and Gek. Big Adventure” based on the story by Arkady Gaidar. Julia Shagelman I was taken by surprise by the unexpected monumentality of the film adaptation, in which a short and simple text was adorned with live bears, giant toy hares and characters of other famous writers.

December for domestic cinemas has always been a hot time of struggle for the audience and the release of films that should capture the screens during the long New Year holidays. In not so ancient times, this meant clearing the box office of Hollywood releases, but this year, Western major studios left on their own back in February-March, announcing their own sanctions on the Russian film market. Now Western competitors attend it only behind the scenes, in the form of semi-underground screenings of some “Black Panther” in non-network cinemas. So, theoretically, now no one will prevent Yolka 9, Yolka Needles and other Secret Santas from competing with each other in a fair fight (whether the audience will win something in it is another question).

“Chuk and Gek” is one of those New Year’s releases that is aimed at the youngest audience aged 6+. Although the stylistic solution of the picture should rather evoke warm nostalgic feelings (or at least the joy of recognition) in the audience, who is still familiar with Gaidar’s story, that is, in parents or even grandparents. It turned out very well that the story here is told from the point of view of children, who, even in the most severe times, do not notice the bad and are still able to discern a fairy tale in the surrounding reality. Therefore, the Soviet past can be portrayed in the aesthetics of “Old Songs about the Essentials”, which has nothing to do with reality, which once marked the return to the collective unconscious of the image of the USSR as a magical country in which milk rivers flowed in jelly banks made according to GOST. Sometimes the authors are so carried away by the material world, all these perpetual calendars, self-knitted sweaters, matchboxes, tooth powders, cotton Christmas toys and other wealth from flea markets (on the screen, however, looking brand new and never used), that they forget about it for a long time. plot development.

The plot, meanwhile, has undergone noticeable changes compared to the original source. It all starts like Gaidar: geologist Seregin (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) works in the distant taiga beyond the Blue Mountains, and his wife (Yulia Snigir) and sons Chuk (Andrey Andreev) and Gek (Yuri Stepanov) live in Moscow overlooking the Kremlin stars. In the film, their separate apartment became a communal apartment – it seems, only in order to introduce comical neighbors (Igor Pismenny and Natalya Kalyakina), dad’s work took on a specific shape – he is looking for molybdenum, and mom got the name Marusya and profession. She is a pop singer, and her main hit in 1939 is the vocalization “I am very glad, because I am finally returning home …” (the same one that became famous performed by Eduard Khil and turned into a meme ten years ago, better known to the Internet public as “ Trololo”), which was written in 1965.

Marusya and her children are going to visit her husband for the New Year, but then a telegram comes from him stating that the visit will have to be canceled, since his expedition, which did not find any molybdenum, is being transferred to the Far East. In the story, this telegram was accidentally lost during a children’s quarrel, but in the film, the older Huck deliberately hides it, because he really wants to meet his dad. So the family boards a CGI train filled with a new portion of retro items and meets a funny guy with a mustache (Timofey Tribuntsev, like other supporting actors in the film, wasted on a short optional episode).

After arriving in the taiga, in the story, the children and their mother simply calmly waited for their father, who had gone to another camp for two weeks, sitting by the stove, plucking rabbits and making Christmas decorations with their own hands. Perhaps it is really difficult to make a fascinating movie out of this, so director Kott and screenwriters Vladimir Arkusha and Denis Chervyakov replace these simple joys with a phantasmagoria similar to one of the terrible dreams of his little heroes described by Gaidar. First, they arrange a bear attack on the watchman, then make Marusya, Chuk and Gek separately get lost in the taiga, fall through the ice of a river that suddenly opened in a 50-degree frost, meet wolves and the same bear (at the same time, in a film with a budget of 201 million rubles scenes with animals somehow look like a bad combined shooting with people in bear costumes).

But the highlight of the program is Chuka’s toys – a blue bunny with a drum, a truck and a tin red commander on a dashing horse, which come to life and grow to gigantic sizes, apparently symbolizing the unrestrained children’s imagination. The Mistress of the Copper Mountain (Milena Sofronova) also appears here – this non-obvious crossover by producer Arsen Gottlieb was inspired by the fact that the son of Arkady Gaidar married the daughter of Pavel Bazhov. It is she who helps the heroes to discover the notorious molybdenum – for a complete and unconditional happy ending. True, there is still no certainty that her intervention will save the New Year’s box office.