Review of Anna Melikyan’s film “Anna’s Feelings”

Anna Melikyan’s new film “Anna’s Feelings” is being released – a drama with fantasy elements about a Perm chocolate factory worker who suddenly began to hear alien voices. The main role was played by another Anna – Mikhalkova, on whose organic acting the philosophical-magical-realistic, and in some places even politically satirical concept of the film rests. However, she does this, according to Yulia Shagelman, with great difficulty and eventually collapses.

The film takes place in our time, but with a slight bias towards dystopia. There is still a pandemic going on here (not of covid, but of some unnamed virus), a huge screen with a counter of sick and dead hangs above the bus stop, people wear respirators and, when entering public transport, stop at the door to be treated with an antiseptic – however, while the mask is working , as in real life, they increasingly slide under the chin, and by the end of the film the characters almost forget about them. On TV, announcer Ekaterina Andreeva (as herself) talks about the upcoming dispatch of volunteer colonists to Mars: when the main character arrives in Moscow, she will be greeted there by the banner “Mars is ours!” at the Oktyabr cinema. A barely perceptible phase shift is emphasized by the black and white image, making everything that happens in the film conventional and timeless exactly to the extent required by its creators.

The most ordinary family lives in this convention: Anna (Anna Mikhalkova), whose job at a confectionery factory is to shovel chocolate mass on a conveyor belt, her husband Sergei (Timofey Tribuntsev), who works at a sausage factory, and their two children. The teenage son (Fedor Butin) dreams of becoming a popular YouTube streamer, the daughter (Margarita Zubareva) is needed in the plot to emphasize the parental emotional upheavals. Parents are not particularly tender towards their children, but the spouses have a very loving relationship, and life in general, although boring, is stable and comfortable. She rolls along her usual rut, until one day Anna, having received an electric shock from a broken electrical wire, falls in the street, hits her head and stops sleeping at night – she becomes a “contactee” for extraterrestrial civilizations and writes down messages to humanity under their dictation.

These messages are not very original: the aliens are calling on homo sapiens to urgently stop being carried away by technological progress and start loving each other, otherwise in ten years we will face complete destruction. There are also smaller predictions that come true immediately, for example, about the escape of a chimpanzee from the Moscow zoo and the crash of a plane over the Mediterranean Sea. Videos posted on social networks, where Anna reads all this, make her a star – at first on a regional scale. Local TV journalists are chasing her, she is invited to its meetings by the Anomaly club, whose members believe that aliens have already visited our planet, and there a writer (Oleg Yagodin) sets his sights on her, with whom the heroine begins an affair, although You can immediately see from his face that he is a rogue. But he calls Anna a “sweet woman,” throwing a bridge from Melikyan’s film to Vladimir Fetin’s film of the same name (1976), where Natalya Gundareva also played a confectionery factory worker who just wanted to be loved.

The best moments in the gigantic running time of the film are precisely these, everyday ones, about the collision of a simple man in the street with sudden fame, which opens in the soul of the main character a bottomless well of unrealized and not even fully realized desires. Buying a fur coat, a photo shoot for a glossy magazine, whose arrogant employees hide Anna’s fresh makeup and hairstyle under a huge helmet, dating with a writer – these scenes may be simple, superficial and vulgar in places, but at least the acting is accurate and convincing.

However, Melikyan’s everyday tragicomedy is not enough, and prose episodes are interrupted either by views of the starry sky, or by thoughtful statements, or even both. I would like to think that this is such irony, but we are talking about a director in whose films the game designer becomes the incarnation of Andrei Rublev (Fairy, 2019), and a barren woman becomes pregnant after going on a pilgrimage to Saint Matrona (Three, 2020), and all this is completely serious. And there is certainly no subtlety in the scenes preceding the finale, when the director of the confectionery factory suddenly bursts into a lengthy monologue about the nature of power and the thirst for love, and the factory itself turns into a Kafkaesque-Orwellian conveyor belt, only no longer a chocolate one, but a human one. It’s hard to disagree with the “make love, not war” message, but when it’s shouted in your face after more than two black and white hours, it no longer produces the intended effect.