Life in frosty light – Newspaper Kommersant No. 9 (7454) dated 01/19/2023

Filmed at a temperature of -56, which is reported not without pride in the opening credits, Dmitry Davydov’s film “Youth” warms with inner warmth, scarce both in cinema and in life, which I immediately felt on myself Andrey Plakhov.

Forty-year-old Vasya Nikolaev returns to the Yakut village, which he left after school for the temptations of the big city and never came back here after. Behind him is the army, a broken family with two children, the bottom line is loneliness, alimony, lack of a profession and loved ones. Plus, a reputation that has been stretching since childhood: they remember him with the words “brake”, “the one that hit a tree”. And he was remembered by one of the locals that he borrowed a motorcycle from him and disappeared for a good twenty years.

So they meet Vasya without much joy. He immediately becomes the object of close attention of the village fighters at the disco, and he cannot do without a visit to the cops. Tries to finish up with former classmates and classmates, but everyone has their own life, families. And no one needs a hero left alone in an abandoned parental house, in the company of a bottle and a fly – the only living creature that lives nearby in the void and permafrost.

There may be a false impression that this film is a gray melancholy, a dull and boring spectacle. Nothing of the kind: it splatters with anarchism and youthful energy, fully answering its name. “Youth” – a new product of “Sahalliwood” – is the name given with respectful irony to the phenomenon of Yakut cinema, which has been going on marvelously for the whole world for more than a decade. The authors of Molodist allow themselves to joke about themselves. A homegrown “Dracula” is playing on the TV screen, the audience is chuckling and commenting. One encouragingly: “Cool movie. The Yakuts began to shoot well.” Another skeptical: “This is when the Yakuts made good films?”

Today, cinema from Sakha no longer needs the indulgent blessing of metropolitan snobs. And against the backdrop of the depression experienced by the Russian film industry, it looks like an island of safety and undead humanity. It sounds that sincere original note that made the cinema of Vasily Shukshin an event in its time. But even more accurate is the association with the films of Aki Kaurismäki, a “proud Finn with a Slavic soul”, a claustrophobia singer of long white nights and a “proletarian metaphysician”.

Director Dmitry Davydov is from the same galaxy of “marginal” authors. His characters are outsiders, infantiles, outcasts, drunks. In “The Scarecrow” – a drinking, hated by the environment healer, whose mystical gift saves people. In “Bonfire in the Snow” – fathers who have lost their children. In “Illegal” – a migrant from Bishkek, lost in the Yakut taiga, in “Songs of Summer” – an old moonshiner and a mysterious guest of his house. The pace of the director’s work (all these films were shot within two years) and the inventive variety of plots are striking. And most importantly – a motley palette of genres with which Davydov famously experiments, shuffling and mixing them in the most unexpected proportions. Social and existential drama, mysticism and horror, satire and grotesque, comedy and, finally, the musical – elements of all this can be found in the same “Youth”.

Of course, if this is a comedy, then it is sad and bitter – like the life of the hero himself, expressively played by the actor Albert Alekseev, like the life of his fellow villagers. But not at all hopeless, because in these people, who grew up in the bitter cold, stoic dignity, severe kindness and poetic connection with the spirits and myths of their native land have been preserved.

The last thing that can be said about Molodist is that it is an “ethnographic” or “exotic” movie. No, this movie is modern, elegantly filmed, with conceptual solutions. What are the fake advertising inserts in which the director himself sells either wigs or snowdrop tincture. The scene at the disco is executed in an ominous blue color, and many of the characters involved in the plot appear in the form of shadows – with a voice, but without a visible body. Again an analogy: it is not for nothing that Kaurismäki called one of his best paintings “Shadows in Paradise”. And you also think about his parody rockers from the Leningrad Cowboys group, allegedly from a Siberian collective farm, when listening to the Yakut rock of the Hardyy group. As many as twelve of their compositions are scattered in the film, among them – which gave the name to the picture “Eder Saas” (“Youth”). Madness and patience, youth without old age – this is the tone of this film about the restless and rebellious Yakut soul. No less mysterious than Russian.