Operation “Gag” – Weekend – Kommersant
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January 30 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonid Gaidai, the most popular Soviet comedian, one of the leaders of the cinema of the thaw, which, in fact, was not very suitable for the time in which he had to work.
Almost all texts about Leonid Gaidai begin with reservations. Indeed, he has a slightly paradoxical status in Russian culture. One of the main figures of the Soviet film canon, in this canon he is almost an anti-hero – the embodiment of consumer goods, the opposite of that great art that Soviet cinema has always wanted to be. Distrust, and sometimes outright dislike for Gaidai, was shared by film intellectuals and representatives of the authorities. The fact is that both great artists and officials perceived cinematography as an instrument of enlightenment – the education of taste, feeling, mind, and political consciousness. Gaidai pointedly ignored this setting – he did not raise the viewer to new heights, but descended with him to the bitten priests.
This low bet was clearly a conscious choice. Gaidai could become quite a worthy comedian-satirist. This unfortunate fate is indicated by The Bridegroom from the Other World, published in 1958, cut up by censorship, but still remaining a witty, albeit quite ordinary caricature of the Soviet bureaucracy. In addition, Gaidai clearly had a delicate taste and an excellent sense of form. This can be seen primarily in “Business People” with their brilliant stylization of the old American cinema. However, he not only discarded both satire and clever eccentricity, but put it at the service of the delusional and rude burlesque that reigns in his films from “Dog Watchdog” to the dying “Good weather on Deribasovskaya”.
The main mode of late Soviet humor was wit. Wit, even the most innocent, involves a small conspiracy between the joker and the listener/watcher, a hint and a leap of awareness. In the Soviet case, it turned out to be the territory of a common game of artists, authorities and the public – intellectual cats and mice. Cultural audiences craved hidden meanings, looking for hints where there were often none at all. The censors did the same, sometimes reaching frankly paranoid heights in catching allusions. Gaidai defiantly walked out of this game. He contrasted the mental leap with a dashing jump and fall – a gag. The best verbal jokes of his films, all kinds of “bambarbia kergudu” and “instantly in the sea” – the same gags; they almost do not differ from those obligatory in Gaidai’s paintings of snitches.
The exit from the unreliable language of allusions to the feigned one-dimensional language of the body gave Gaidai something like a safe-conduct. Officials and critics tolerated him primarily because of the constant box office success (in the 1960s, when Gaidai began to flourish, the Soviet film industry was just preoccupied with the issue of profit, which had little worried its organizers before). At the same time, in a curious way, Gaidai was allowed much more than many much more trustworthy directors – outright eroticism, mockery of authorities at all levels, jokes about shortages, and so on. But the main thing is a unique picture of the Soviet world. This is a world of total idiocy, uniting, as it were, positive and, as it were, negative characters, penetrating study, work, creativity, family life, love, death, and all other spheres of human existence.
Common place: Gaidai instilled in Soviet comedy the aesthetics and technique of the American slapstick – Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd. He did not hide this, scattering references to silent classics throughout the films. But there was also an important difference. Those always had a humanistic pathos: confrontation between a funny little man and a big soulless world (in many respects that is why Chaplin was so loved in the USSR). With Gaidai, this division becomes a pure convention. Good and evil are the functions necessary to start the exchange of cuffs – bodily and verbal. We sympathize with reasoner Shurik no more and no less than we do Coward, Dunce and Experienced (that is, in general, we sympathize very little), we perceive Gesha and Semyon Semyonych not as antagonists, but as partners in a bad game.
In the hidden denial of morality, his films revealed, as it were, an extra-ideological and extra-ethical space – a space of cheerful indifference, openly manifested in the famous song about “But we don’t care!”. The problem was that there wasn’t much room for maneuver in that space. The number of tricks was limited, they quickly became boring, and the director felt this very well, refusing to churn out the adventures of characters already beloved by the public.
Perhaps that is why Gaidai felt a kind of jealousy for the wit that he rejected. He tested again and again whether it was possible to translate the classics of wit into the language of slapstick and thereby triumph over the competition. It really turned out great with him with O. Henry, not bad with Bulgakov, noticeably worse with Gogol, so-so with Ilf and Petrov, absolutely bad with Zoshchenko. However, along with the accumulation of failures, the era changed.
The 1970s were the time of Gaidai’s decline. It’s not that he squeezed everything out of the manner invented in the early 1960s. The stagnation was a time of constrained movements and unsettling ambiguities. This era was well felt by Ryazanov, Danelia, Melnikov. Gaidai, on the other hand, scrapes out the last reserve of his eccentria in Ivan Vasilyevich. His next films come across as a joke that painfully fails, a stunt that fails.
But he turned out to be one of the few Soviet directors who benefited from perestroika. This time of changelings, a gloomy carnival, when the strong construction of society turned into a flimsy decoration, was extremely organic to Gaidai’s nihilistic talent, suited him much more than a naive-utopian thaw. Released in 1989, “Private Detective, or Operation Cooperation” is his most honest film. There are no annoying principles anymore, restrictions are lifted, heroes and rogues are indeed almost indistinguishable from each other. The city, the country, and in the finale the entire globe becomes the arena for a huge stupid gag.
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