Porn during the plague – Weekend – Kommersant
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At the Artdocfest documentary film festival, held in Riga in early March, Artem and Eve will be shown – a film about how a simple girl Yulia and her boyfriend Artem came from Omsk to Moscow to study, and ended up in the States for the presentation of “pornooscars” . Now fans know what the saleswoman looked like, from whom the future Eva Elfi bought a dildo.
“Artyom and Eve” by Evgeny Milykh are two completely different films at the same time. The first is a romantic drama for those to whom the name Eva Elfi means nothing. Innocent viewers will see the unexpected and touching success story of a cute lop-eared girl who in just a year turned into a world celebrity acting in adult films. This is a film about her relationship with her boyfriend, Artem, who, in fact, filmed her first home videos. About her cheerful skirmishes with her family (“We decided to send you for potatoes, weeding. It will be wonderful – Yulia with a chopper on potatoes”), boring friendly gatherings (while Yulia’s friends are discussing the porn business, Yulia quietly trains to roll her tongue into a tube), about decisions , which she accepts – for example, to go to Europe to act in films for adults – and Artem follows her lead, complaining every now and then, noah, demanding something. In the middle of filming, he manages to say that he “needs to rest.” The California coast does not inspire him at all: “It’s like … Chelyabinsk.” After the pornoscar ceremony in Los Angeles, Artem and Yulia decide to go to Las Vegas and get married. And it seems that they get even more tired of each other, but Yulia fearlessly pulls and pulls this relationship.
The second film is a comedy for those who have already lost their innocence, that is, they saw Eva Elfi in, let’s say, feature films and has some idea of the modern porn industry. For them, Artyom and Eva is the endlessly funny underside of porn videos, a literal adaptation of the joke about the woman who always watches porn movies: “I want to know if he will marry her after all this or not.” So, get married. The viewer knows more than the characters know, and therefore he has something to laugh at. Here Artem complains: “No one watches our video.” Julia consoles him: “Already 28,000 views!” The viewer is funny: now the video in question has about 900 million views.
Chess games, convertible rides, cooing in love and tediousness – everything that fills the pauses between filming adult content in Artyom and Eva turns out to be either a search for a plot, or a search for nature, or a search for accessories. Director Evgeny Milykh shoots episodes of “18+” dispassionately and inventively, without showing anything superfluous, turning porn into a chore.
Milykh, who graduated from the Moscow Film School, already participated in Artdocfest with the short film “Nothing Personal” in 2018, a tragicomedy about partners, one of whom opens any locks, and the second confiscates opened real estate for debts and torments himself with questions about whether he lives right . The couple in “Artyom and Eve” is arranged in much the same way: Eva opens the world, Artyom toils. As in “Nothing Personal”, in “Artyom and Eve” Milykh closely follows the small gestures, facial expressions of his characters, listens to their tongue-tied questions to the universe, does not give them any answers. The shadow of the director with the shadow of the camera wanders around the heroes at sunset. Where is the reality here, where is the dock, where is the game, where is the tune?
Artyom’s real porn name is Adam, but this is not mentioned in the film. The director is not interested in the original sin of innocent heroes and not in the organization of their Internet paradise. Yevgeny Milykh tells about a girl devoid of complexes, about a girl who does not even know what letter the phrase “existential crisis” begins with, about a girl who easily and freely turns from Yulia into Eve, an object of desire for millions. And about a young man who is in no way given the transformation into Adam. The young man is nagging, thinking about his generation, about marginals and rules, he suffers, because “from some kind of hobby that brought pleasure and money” porn for him “turns into torment”. Who created whom – Artem Eva or vice versa? Who owes whom? Who supports whom? What is more important for Artyom – cinema or his mood? What is love? What of this can be shown to the Russian audience? Is it true that their generation, as Artem says, is a generation <...> (idiots)?
“Artyom and Eva” is not a portrait of a generation, but of a time that has gone forever. There is an almost direct quote from Boogie Nights, there is an awkward tenderness, like in Soviet production novels, there are even echoes of the Rastorguev-Kostomarov project Reality: the characters also live on camera and play themselves, reveling in this feeling of their own vulnerability and omnipotence. But the closest thing to Artyom and Eva is probably Steven Soderbergh’s Call Girl. Artyom and Eve is related to this film not only by the genre of production cinema, not only by the fact that Eva Elfi looks infinitely free, purposeful and outrageously natural, like Sasha Grey, or even freer. Soderbergh placed his heroine in the fall of 2008, fixing the inexorably looming future. The future fell on Artyom and Eve by itself, and the film is perceived today as a story about Atlantis and its two inhabitants who loved each other as best they could.
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