Mongolian filmmakers filmed Rasputin’s story “Deadline”

Mongolian filmmakers filmed Rasputin's story "Deadline"

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The film “Cuckoo” by the Mongolian director Zhamyansuren Zhanchivdorzh based on the story “Deadline” by Valentin Rasputin participates in the competition of the film festival “Kinoshock” held in Anapa. Its action takes place not in a Russian village, but in a yurt. It is difficult to say whether some of the motives are inspired by what is happening today, since the director from Ulaanbaatar did not come to the festival. Not only foreigners did not make it, but also some Russians. Some of the young directors while still in Moscow on their way to the airport were stopped by the police for possible mobilization.

Shortly before the death of Rasputin, I had a chance to meet him at the Irkutsk Drama Theater. Okhlopkov, where they staged “Deadline”. Then he said that he wrote the story in 1970 and since then life has not gotten better, the Russian village is still being destroyed, and the performance has been gaining something new since 2008.

In the Mongolian version, the action takes place not in the Russian village, as in Rasputin’s, where the old woman Anna dies, but in the mountains, in the steppe region. The 93-year-old heroine lives there with her youngest son Dashdorj, daughter-in-law Tuul and granddaughter Hulan. The main role was played by the Mongolian actress Tangad Borkhuu. In 2017, she received an award for the best acting work at the Trans-Baikal Film Festival in Chita, where we saw the Chinese film “Mother’s Airfield” by Zhou Yupeng. And there, too, was the role of a pasture dweller who adopted a boy from Shanghai brought to Inner Mongolia during the famine of the 1960s.

The camera moves slowly around the yurt. In a conspicuous place is a portrait of a man in a national Mongolian costume, a candle is burning in front of him. This is the old woman’s husband. In the middle of the yurt, something is boiling in a saucepan. Suitcases are stacked up. The furniture is good, painted. An elderly woman is lying on the bed, and it seems that she is dead. And behind the walls of the yurt, life is in full swing. The Soviet “loaf” rushes along the bumps. The mountain landscape is replaced by the steppe. It feels like we are inside the car too.

At one of the three yurts, a ram is butchered, there are two “loaves” and a modern car, reminiscent of what time everything happens. The daughter wails over her mother. Relatives are coming. The old woman, waking up from non-existence, grieves that her youngest daughter Uyangi, Tancha, never arrived at Rasputin’s. In the story, the mother asks her relatives: maybe something is happening in Kyiv, where she lives. The son replies that if there were any disturbing events, then long ago, when there were Germans. Day follows night, but the old woman is still alive. In anticipation of the outcome, the men drink vodka by a mountain river.

In the Mongolian version, the youngest daughter will appear – a real beauty, but not from Kyiv, like Rasputin, but from heaven. She is fit for the old woman’s granddaughter. Together they will cry. What was it? Vision? The old woman falls out of the window, and then asks her son for a pipe. After one puff, he will say: “Let me go.” We will not see the old woman again, only in the portrait, which the son will put next to the photograph of his father. He will immediately put up a portrait of his younger sister and light two more candles. And no explanation. Just no sister. Death will be replaced by an evening landscape, blue mountains, against their background – the overweight figure of the youngest son, who betrayed his mother to the ground. The son was played by the popular Mongolian actor Tserenbold Tsegmid.

This film about the majesty of death was filmed by director and screenwriter Zhamyansuren Zhanchivdorzh. He will soon be 50. He was born in the family of a well-known artist in Mongolia. He did not study in Moscow, as was often the case with the filmmakers of his country and generation. But he felt Rasputin’s prose, he caught the main thing. The picture runs for more than two hours, and many frames are like pictures – and this is the merit of the cameraman Nerguiyem Erdenehuyag.

Ludmila Zaitseva. Photo: Dmitry Korobeinikov





Looking at actress Tangad Borkhuu, one comes to think about how wasteful we are with older actresses. The star of Soviet cinema, Lyudmila Zaitseva, who is rarely filmed, arrived in Anapa. But she is in excellent shape, which was demonstrated by Sergei Ursulyak’s Quiet Flows the Don. She is not offered roles on a Rasputin scale. Zaitseva came to the festival for the evenings in memory of Viktor Merezhko and Stanislav Rostotsky. We saw a fragment of the film “Hello and Goodbye” by Vitaly Melnikov, where she is very young next to the experienced Oleg Efremov. “When they offered to play, I didn’t understand what wonderful material it was,” says Lyudmila Zaitseva. – My heroine digs a garden with her husband and says: “I don’t love you, Mitya, that’s what.” “I used to love it.” “I didn’t know before that I didn’t love you.” How to feel the female soul to write like that. Melnikov then came to Moscow to get acquainted with the artists. I just graduated from the Shchukin School. I didn’t have much to wear. Ira Kupchenko had a “deuce” – a small sweater, and a jacket on top. The sleeves were a little frayed, but it really suited me. Ira said: “Put it on. The neck will look good. And roll up your sleeves, who will look at them. I came to some hotel, I look, they are sitting tall with a beard – Merezhko, and a small, some kind of Chinese – Melnikov. I was inexperienced, I didn’t know how to present myself, I said something about a wonderful script. And besides me, real actresses came, one in a sable hat and fur coat. I was sure that they would take her. Merezhko told me later that he and Melnikov had immediately decided that I would play. And I had a feeling that I did not look at them. In 1972, we went to the shooting, an amazing Rostov life began with visiting borscht and balyk. When filming in the city, they made a cordon. During a break, I went outside the fence in a cotton dress. The police did not let me back – I don’t look like an artist. ” Now even in Anapa Zaitseva will not be recognized. She is like everyone else, she does not look like an artist at all.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28877 dated September 27, 2022

Newspaper headline:
Vision of a Mongolian woman from Kiev

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