MIFF will reward the “Garden” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 157 (7358) of 08/29/2022

The Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF), which opened on August 26, continues its work. He tells about Russian paintings in his competition programs Yulia Shagelman.

Two of the three Russian films included in the main competition of the festival – “The Kitchen Garden” by Larisa Sadilova and “Camel Arch” by Vitaly Suslin – turned out to be very close to each other both thematically and stylistically. Both films are reminiscent of Soviet rural cinema, moving away from topicality into the depiction of small private lives of “little people”.

The main character of the Garden, almost 70-year-old Zoya (Valentina Telichkina), lives in the Bryansk region with her younger sister Ella (as always, irresistible Olga Lapshina). She spends the summer in the garden, wraps cucumbers and tomatoes in jars, which she sends to Moscow for her adult sons and niece, and in winter she goes to a boarding house for the cores for a couple of weeks. There, for three years, she has been continuing a quiet sanatorium romance with Valera (the debut film role of Yuri Kutafin, an artist of the Kursk Philharmonic, like his hero). When he admits that next year he will come to the sanatorium with his wife, Zoya proudly leaves, but she cannot forget Valera, just like he cannot forget her. They continue to be drawn to each other, and this longing for intimacy and love is voiced by Pakhmutova’s song “Tenderness”, which, of course, immediately brings to mind “Three poplars on Plyushchikha”, although here the ending will be happier. However, the main content of the film is not a love story, but the provincial life itself with its second-class carriages, electric trains, random fellow travelers in them, village weddings, colorful bedspreads on upholstered furniture and the series “Sighted” on TV (a hilarious parody of the series “Blind” ). All this, as in other works by Sadilova, is shown good-naturedly and with humor, but at the same time without populist tenderness.

Like the heroes of The Garden, the elderly shoemaker Igor (Alexander Karnaushkin) from Camel’s Arc often has his head in the clouds. He now and then withdraws into himself, remembering his own childhood and writing down these memories in a notebook. Hearing from a friend (Mikhail Maltsev) the biblical story about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, Igor lights up with a dream to see the “magic” Red Sea, but on the way to the dream he has to overcome many obstacles, starting with the skepticism of his wife (Tatiana Altynnik) and adult son (Dmitry Isaev ) in relation to his ideas. Like Sadilova, Suslin treats his characters with sincere sympathy, but he manages to strike a balance between skill and sincerity worse.

In the new program of the MIFF “Russian Premieres” there are no such pastorals as in the main competition – here they are busy with existential issues. A Look Like Man by Semyon Serzin is his second adaptation of Dmitry Danilov’s play after The Man from Podolsk (even its original title, Witness Testimony, has been changed so that the pictures seem like a dilogy). An unnamed investigator, played by the director himself, investigates the circumstances of the death of a certain Sasha Ivanov, who fell out of a window. It seems to be a clear matter – suicide, but the detective stubbornly asks friends and colleagues of the deceased, what he was like. Testimonies, of course, differ, someone remembers Sasha as a great guy, someone as a dull redneck, but the most common answer is: “I can’t say anything about him.” Gradually it becomes clear that the investigator is Sasha himself, and the collection of evidence is his afterlife journey in search of the meaning of his own life. The result, alas, is disappointing: on both sides of the grave, all existence is reduced to endless boredom.

Another theatrical director in the “Russian” competition is the artistic director of the Alexandrinsky theater Valery Fokin, who returned to the cinema after a twenty-year break with the film “Petropolis” based on the script of his son. This is a fantasy dystopia with overtones of conspiracy theory. Scientist Vladimir Ognev (Anton Shagin), who was taken to the United States by his parents as a child, finds out that the entire world order is controlled by aliens whose ships hovered over Miami, Tokyo, Melbourne and St. Petersburg. The UN and the governments of leading countries are in contact with them, but, of course, they hide this information from people, which we were all warned about back in The X-Files. However, there is neither suspense, as in this series, nor “smart fiction” in the spirit of Villeneuve and Nolan in Fokine’s deliberately theatrical, slow-motion and superficially philosophical picture. Rather, the same boredom, all-encompassing and inescapable.