Pavel Maikov played Herring’s deceased father

According to the playwright Tatiana Zagdai, the play “The Man in a Closed Room” is about the generation of thirty-year-olds, whose childhood and youth were in the 90s, and whose fathers lost their country and themselves in a changed world. It is very popular and is staged in many theaters in completely different ways, since it is conventional and provides the opportunity for a variety of interpretations. In one performance Pushkin appears on stage, in another – grandmothers with whitened snouts (there is no other way to say it) who are responsible for the clan. But it’s always a tragic road movie in the style of the 90s.

In the film “Dance, Herring!” Alexandra Lupashko’s theatrical convention did not work, and the film turned out without surprises. Only in its second half, when it unexpectedly turned to a psychological drama, did its own special story begin to emerge.

Alexandra Lupashko is an actress by first education, a graduate of Vladimir Menshov’s directing workshop. She made short films and worked at the seraglio “Tetka” before making her feature film debut under the wing of Sergei Selyanov.

The role of Herring named Zhanna, known in her home provincial town as Anka, was played by the beautiful Alexandra Bortich. You can’t really say about someone like this that a girl can leave the village, but the village can never leave the girl.

From the homely Herring grew into a beauty who left her small homeland in search of a better life. In a blue coat and sweater, she appeared like a diva from the capital at the funeral of her father, whom she had not seen or heard from for many years. Dad didn’t care about her. He drank, played tricks, cheated on his wife, and when he became dead, he suddenly showed interest in his daughter. The role of the deceased tramp was played by Pavel Maikov. “You are a stranger to me, not my dad,” his daughter will tell him. From time to time, the ironic dad appears young and daring, in a fashionable jacket, with a shock of brown hair. Now he is not a passenger, but luggage. A man languished, lived alone and died alone, a neighbor (Olga Lapshina) will say about him. He now talks exclusively to his daughter and follows her like a ghost.

Pavel Maikov is a wonderful artist, and he has enough irony in an unusual role. But in the scenes of his cheerful youth he looks like a mummer. For him, this is a film about love. “All real art speaks of love. And about fear. And nothing more. Whatever we do – Shakespeare, Chekhov, “Dance, Herring!” – all this is about love. If it’s not about love, then it’s a bad movie. Because without love it is impossible. As Khludov said in the play “Running” by Mikhail Bulgakov: “Even in war you cannot live without love.” Love permeates everything. And this film is also about human relationships, about mutual understanding, about the impossibility of understanding each other, about the fact that close people are rarely born under the same roof,” says Pavel Maikov.

Together with her childhood friend Kostya (Ilya Antonenko) – a good guy, but unreliable, as her own mother will say about him – Zhanna-Anya takes her dead father to the regional center. Some conventional things are good on stage, but it’s more difficult to do them on screen. Perhaps, only in the scene with Natalya Pavlenkova in the role of a morgue employee does an almost infernal world appear. With a large bow on her chest and a white coat, an employee of a medical institution, while drunk, begins to dance – an excellent divertissement.

Another film adaptation – “Vera” – was carried out by Ira Volkova, turning to the story “You Never Even Dreamed of…”, popular in Soviet times, by Galina Shcherbakova. It seems that she is a little embarrassed about her own painting, constantly emphasizing that she herself would have chosen something else, but she received an offer from Gorky’s studio. “This story came to me, not I to it. I would bring it to the present. It’s a completely different time now. There are mobile phones, and our heroes could give each other signals. I had the task of making a tragedy, and I myself was for the bright ends. Roma dies when he falls from the window, although everyone wants him to stay alive,” she said after the show.

The director had to fulfill all the demands of the producers, who decided to return to the story of forty years ago. And yet this is not a remake, but a new version of “literature that has the right to be filmed more than once.” The emphasis has shifted. The focus was not on the young lovers, but on the boy’s mother, Vera. Events take place in 1978. The producers did not allow me to leave for the present.

Cameraman Lyubov Knyazeva did not seek to recreate the Soviet era; she was inspired by paintings from the Renaissance. She tried to capture the first intimacy of the young heroes through Titian’s paintings, “pulling out the color of their skin” from there. Sometimes the golden color even gets in the way. They selected Soviet props and tried to open people up through the objective world, but the nectarines failed. Vera buys them at the market in Crimea. But in the USSR they had never even heard of nectarines.

Vera was played by Victoria Tolstoganova with an eye to her mother. After the festival screening, she said that she was the eldest daughter in a family where three other sisters grew up, and the youngest of them was 17 years younger than the eldest. “The Soviet era left its mark. I will never forget my mother’s eyes. And then she changed,” recalls Victoria.

The problems that concern her heroine in the story, for example, excessive fatness, according to the director, are not relevant today. And the actress, having read that a plump woman, walking her son to school on September 1, rubbed her plump leg, thought: “That’s not me.” However, she agreed to act. The feet in the Soviet footwear were shown in close-up. You won’t forget these.

Victoria Tolstoganova has entered a difficult time for an actress, when the number of offers begins to decline catastrophically, and if they offer anything, it is mainly the role of mothers. And Victoria had a Renaissance. The roles come together in theater and cinema, one is better than the other, but most often they offer material about complex relationships with sons. Although in the film “The Edge of the Broken Moon” she got difficult daughters.

Vera is an ichthyologist and biologist. This is the biography they came up with for her. She loves the north and snow. When asked what fish she could identify with, she answers that it is cod. She goes on business trips exclusively to the Arctic Ocean, but in order to get closer to her son, she asks to be sent to Sevastopol. During the Soviet years, not everyone could go to this closed city. This required special permission.

Victoria Tolstoganova admits: “I don’t justify my heroine, but accuse her, but I want to understand the cause-and-effect relationship. She is a creature because she does not know how to feel and kills her child. Her mother (played by Olga Lapshina – S.Kh.)) did not teach her to love.” Victoria quotes from her childhood: “Only prostitutes get their ears pierced before the age of 18.” Everyone has their own childhood, but even in the generation older, girls had their ears pierced during their school years. The feeling that Vera feels towards her husband and his first lover is not jealousy, but surprise that people can love. And she is capable of hating for no reason. Yulka, with whom her young son is in love, is not a person at all for her. Victoria proceeded from this. She found it interesting to play such a heroine, and the role was a success.

Ira Volkova was not looking for “Soviet people” and “Soviet children.” “They are who they are. We didn’t force them to watch Soviet films. Many guys have a lot of modern tense in their language. The intimacy scene was difficult for them,” she said after the screening. Ira believes that many children now are much more modest than her own generation at the same age.

Roma was played by Timofey Timkov, who at the time of filming had just entered the St. Petersburg Theater Academy. The casting director was looking for heroes among the applicants, so they cast 17-year-old actors, which was important and worked well. Polina Merkuryeva also played her first role – the girl Yulka, similar to Tatyana Aksyuta from the first film adaptation of Shcherbakova’s story in 1980, which was performed by Ilya Frez. But that film did not become a starting point, they did not focus on it, and the authors of “Vera” did not reconsider it. Victoria Tolstoganova remembered only the face of the girl in horn-rimmed glasses. By the way, Lidia Fedoseeva-Shukshina played Vera in Fraz’s film. The difference is obvious. Ira Volkova did not remember the name Tatyana Aksyuta, and the young people in the audience, most likely, knew nothing at all about the story or the film.

The first and new versions were combined by composer Alexey Rybnikov, who also worked with Ilya Frez. The producers of Vera saw it as a DNA link to the film from forty years earlier. For the new film, which he liked, he wrote new music.