parallel movie with a marketable title

In the box office – “Brother 3”, a film that has nothing to do with either the well-known film “Brother” or the usual cinema. This is, in its own way, a fresh example, although from the early 1990s, an example of an approach to audiovisual content and its promotion as a joke, an attempt to cross the artistic practices of parallel cinema with the marketing capabilities of the lower Internet.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

“Brother 3”, or “Brother III”, or “Brattt”, as they write in the first frames of this film, begins with meaningful titles: “Friend is the 1st hypostasis of man to man. Comrade is the second hypostasis of man to man. Brother is the 3rd hypostasis of man to man.” Obviously, this work is exactly what every viewer who sees it would like to become a friend, comrade and brother. A film that claims to become a meme, a stigma, a viral video, but is bogged down in amazing narcissism (I want to cross out and write “concentrated authorial origin”) combined with echolalia and echopraxia (if anyone doesn’t know, this is a symptom of involuntary repetition of someone else’s words and gestures).

For two hours, “Brother 3” speaks incessantly with quotes, riddles and jokes, hiding behind intricately compiled shots in which you can recognize anything – be it “Brother”, or “Assu”, or “Tractor Drivers II”, or even the cinematic matinees of “Soyuzmultfilm” , which artist-director Valery Pereverzev probably visited on weekends at his local cinema when he was little. First, a certain city, filmed for Soviet newsreels, emerges from the splices; this is Tambov from the dreams of Pereverzev and his co-author, producer and wife Yulia Pereverzeva. Then – flirtatious credits: “The film was partially shot by a Soviet camera “Kvarts” produced in 1974 on Super 8 film.” Then – a flea on balloons cut out from some educational book. Soviet cars are running through the streets. The street writhes with tongueless and cartoonish speech, the author’s voice of a girl sitting at the Yatran typewriter. Frankly, as a child I sat down at the keys to quickly type out an imperishable novel, early in the morning.

“Brother 3” cannot be denied its ambition, and its authors – their determination. They decorated the credits with artists dear to their hearts: they presented Syroezhkin-Electronics (Yuri Torsuev) with the rank of general and stripes, and dressed Eric Roberts in a fantastic white jacket. Having received a box of Tambov kvass in a Tambov warehouse, Roberts says: “The Tambov wolf is your comrade” – and leaves in a white Volga with a blue stripe and the inscription “Conscience of the Nation.” Then there will be even more of everything: there will be aerodrome caps, there will be native species, there will be a fly-cake, collages, current and not so relevant works of contemporary art, tons of heterogeneous Msheloim junk and treasures dear to the heart, layered on top of each other in an attempt to form some meaning by the fact itself joining one texture to another.

This is how spaceships of different political systems dock with each other, but in the movies such manipulations do not always go smoothly. And although there is hope to glue everything together with love, in “Brother 3” the head will definitely turn off at some point and float, unable to record what is happening. Naturally, you can console yourself with the hope that this is exactly the effect the authors wanted to achieve. After all, “love, like a dream, has passed by,” sings the VIA “Blue Bird” voiceover.

Special mention should be made about the audio accompaniment. In its grotesque eclecticism, it does not lag behind the picture – radio rustling, clattering and ticking, arranged either by favorite music (for example, the dear Alexander Laertsky, whose ability to swear was turned off for the sake of the ride), or even by poems by Joseph Brodsky, which were read in different voices with expression and how -sometimes with secret, and sometimes with banal obvious intent. They start with reinforced concrete: “I woke up twice that night / and wandered to the window, and the lanterns in the window, / a fragment of a phrase spoken in a dream, / nullifying, like an ellipsis, / did not bring me any comfort,” – that is, already at the start viewers are warned about the oneiric nature of the cinematic medium and are turned away from the film by those who are accustomed to seeing some kind of linear meaning in what is happening on the screen. It is reasonable. They say, dots to dots are not a line for folding stereotypical cinematic narratives, but simply dots in place of which, as in a textbook, you can insert your own words.

Well, there would probably really be an abundance of words if “Brother 3” at least sometimes calmed down the semantic flow with which it is so bursting. When the screen says so much, the viewer, and even more so the critic, should probably remain silent. After all, “Brother 3”, made up of fragments of archetypal characters, plots, methods and consciousness of perestroika cinema, quite confidently comments on itself, and at the same time on everyone who decided to watch it. Half an hour before the finale, watching another Mexican hitch with a shootout in the spirit of Tarantino (we usually say so: in the spirit of Tarantino), you can’t help but think that it was in vain that you laughed so much at the film for the previous hour and a half – after all, all this time the film was laughing at you. But don’t be offended. Apparently, no one intended to present the viewer in a comic light. “Comedy is when it’s not funny” is the slogan on the poster. I would add that a comedy is a comedy, and Brother 3 is definitely something else.

In theaters from February 1

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