Oksana Akinshina in a series about female alcoholism
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On the Wink platform there are “Infidels” – a series with an ambiguous heroine played by Oksana Akinshina, a talented Moscow lawyer who makes a career without letting go of the bottle. Alcohol deprived her of parental rights, but it is not so easy to get rid of addiction in order to return the child – because then you will have to look at the world with sober eyes, and this is a challenge that not everyone can handle.
A beautiful woman driving gets into a very ugly story. Alcohol in the blood and a child in the back seat is an unimportant combination, and it’s even worse when an accident occurs due to the fault of a drunk driver. Is it any wonder that in the very next scene the heroine, lawyer and mother Olga Shilkovskaya (Oksana Akinshina) is deprived of parental rights? Here even the most sympathetic viewer will shake his head condemningly and be right, despite the disturbing flashbacks that hint that the ex-husband (Ivan Dobronravov) is still an abuser. This fact may explain Olga’s problems, but it does not exhaust them, much less solve them. The most practical advice Shilkovskaya hears when leaving the courtroom is from an indifferent social worker from the child welfare service: “Pull yourself together, find a job, put your housing in order, and then you can think about restoring parental rights.” Doing this, of course, is more difficult than formulating it. Because try to integrate into society without the usual social lubricant.
“The Unfaithful” – the title remains a mystery in the first two episodes, which, one hopes, will become clearer in the future – is structured as the story of a social comeback by a Moscow lawyer who has lost everything and in this way is similar to “A good wife” – with the only difference that the drinking heroine Oksana Akinshina, in contrast to the heroine Julianna Margulies, deceived by her husband, will not be easy to feel sorry for at first, because she seems to be to blame for everything. While Olga struggles with alcohol addiction, circumstances and the clients she receives after joining the law firm of her friend from her youth, the authors come into conflict with the audience’s conceit and prejudices. Alcoholism, to put it mildly, is stigmatized; it is an illness that is difficult to admit even to yourself, let alone to others. That’s why the phrase at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is banal by the standards of modern world cinema, looks like such a strong gesture: “Hello, my name is Olya, and I’m an alcoholic.”
The mechanics of binges and the reasons that send a prosperous person into them are described by the scriptwriters and director quite clearly and at the same time quite routinely. It’s clear: the bottle is the first means of dealing with stress, escaping reality that is unbearable for delicate natures, a tool for coping with social pressure. Alcoholic courage is understandable and not particularly reprehensible against the backdrop of a plastic world “like people’s”, which is literally presented on the screen in the form of sterile translucent offices, expensive standard apartments, empty and clean playgrounds in closed courtyards and equally formalized, shy depth and labor in understanding another’s human relationships. And to admit that in Russian courts even those who have never taken alcohol into their mouths becomes nauseous is as easy as shelling pears. But this is not enough for the authors – Shilkovskaya’s genealogy and childhood traumas come to the rescue: it turns out that alcohol once ruined Olya’s mother, who is released from prison in the finale of the second series. “We’ll stop by the store, it should be noted,” is about the first thing the imprisoned grandmother says.
It would probably be difficult to revive these dramatic schemes and average rhetorical figures (like the passages of Artem’s ex-husband condemning Olga) if not for the performance of Oksana Akinshina, who draws out the image of a smart, beautiful woman, stupefied by general hypocrisy and a drunkard. Thanks to her, the heroine can be a psychopath in one scene, a caring mother and victim in another, and a passionate hunter in the third. She demonstrates the swing of states depending on the amount of drinking and the feeling of guilt inevitable in the hangover phase with disarming authenticity. Here the “Infidels” are really lucky.
Another formal advantage of the series is the “unreliable narrator” technique on which it is built dramaturgically and edited. For a detective (and each episode of “Infidels” is an attempt to establish the truth in one or another judicial investigation), the situation when you can’t trust anyone adds poignancy. Here, as in “Doctor House,” “everyone lies,” and only Shilkovskaya, even while high, manages to maintain a little more adequacy than those who turned to her for help. And this, in turn, helps to maintain an emotional connection with the heroine: with all her revelry, she most often looks at things more soberly than those who are besotted with the rules of decency and norms of behavior.
Yes, perhaps it would be a stretch to say that Russian cinema before “The Unfaithful” had never spoken out on the topic of alcoholism, or, to narrow it down, taboo female alcoholism. Sacramental “Buzykin, would you like a drink? No? “And I love it when I work” from “Autumn Marathon” succinctly closed the topic back in 1979. But “The Unfaithful” and the heroine Akinshina (following the terminology of Danelia and Volodin, she is a “drinker” and a “walker” rolled into one), who came out from under the wing of the author of the idea Anna Kolchina and showrunner Anastasia Koretskaya, are so brave in their fight with our everyday hypocrisy and the comfort of closed eyes in time, that for this alone it is worth saying thank you to them.
Look: Wink
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