Review of Igor Voloshin’s film “Lord of the Wind”

Igor Voloshin’s film “Lord of the Wind” is being released, based on the true story of the round-the-world flight in a hot air balloon that the famous traveler Fyodor Konyukhov made in 2016. His role was played by Fyodor Bondarchuk, who, together with the entire film crew, spent an hour and a half trying to find the answer to why their hero repeatedly embarks on dangerous adventures. The suggested options appeared Yulia Shagelman not very convincing.

“Lord of the Wind” is one of the long-term projects of Russian cinema in recent years. Fyodor Bondarchuk first spoke about the development of this project back in 2018, presenting it at the Cinema Fund. Then he was going to shoot the picture himself. But when direct preparation for filming began in February 2022, Bondarchuk had just tried on the wig and beard of the main character, and the director’s chair was taken by Igor Voloshin, known for the TV series “Fizruk” (2014–2017) and “Olga” (2016–2023), thrillers “Obsessed” (2021) and “Medea” (2022), as well as the action film “Olympius Inferno” (2009), filmed with the support of Channel One, about the events in South Ossetia in August 2008. This filmography certainly proves the breadth of his directorial range, to which he has now added adventure cinema with elements of either a survival thriller or a drama about spiritual quest.

The creators of “Lord of the Wind” (there are four screenwriters, including the authors of many popular TV series Andrei Zolotarev and Oleg Malovichko, Voloshin himself and Ksenia Miroshnik, for whom this is the first full-length work) do not aspire to present a full biography of Fyodor Konyukhov and demonstrate his numerous records. The film, even with flashbacks to the hero’s childhood, is a compact story of one journey: a solo flight around the world in a Morton hot air balloon, which took place from July 12 to 23, 2016. Thus, it lasted 11 days, 4 hours and 20 minutes, and Fyodor Konyukhov set a new world record, and on the first try – the previous one belonged to the British Steve Fossett, who spent 13 days and 8 hours on the flight, and was able to achieve it only on the sixth attempt .

However, it should be noted that in the film, the traditional theme of Russian cinema, Russia’s superiority over real or imaginary foreign rivals, is not emphasized at all. On the contrary, the friendship of peoples that is surprising for our time reigns on the screen: the balloon for Konyukhov was built in Bristol, it begins and ends its flight in Australia with the full support of the local population (one grumpy farmer, at first dissatisfied with the noise and fuss around “this Russian”, by the end changes his mind), one of the key moments of the plot is associated with obtaining permission to fly from the Uruguayan authorities, not immediately, but yielding to the unbending power of the groom’s spirit, and throughout the entire film the world watches the flight with bated breath under the discord of television announcers.

Konyukhov’s main opponents are the natural elements, the limited capabilities of the human body and the common sense inherent in people who, unlike the hero, are forced to deal with pressing earthly problems, because he himself is constantly looking somewhere up, into the distance and towards God, which he interprets in a peculiar way. and leaves everyday issues to be solved by others. For example, the eldest son Oscar (Evgeniy Tkachuk), who first tries to dissuade his father from a new risky venture, then reaches out to his feelings, then, convinced of the impossibility of this, leaves the expedition, but, of course, returns to take on the problems with Uruguay, navigation, cyclones, flight speed, etc., in general, to fulfill one’s filial duty as it is understood in this family.

Perhaps, only in this line with the son does a hint emerge of some kind of unkempt drama that is not coordinated with living and living prototypes, but, of course, it is precisely because of their active participation in the whole process that it remains a hint. The rest of the family – wife Irina (Anna Mikhalkova with a blissful smile, which she allows to slide from her face only for those eight seconds when her heroine thinks that her husband is dead) and youngest son Kolya (Dmitry Kalikhov) perform the only function: to accept and wait. The audience is invited to do the same, who, however, are still entertained by breathtaking views of the sky and clouds, as well as all sorts of difficulties that Fedor overcomes over and over again.

However, making the audience worry when the ending is known in advance is a difficult task for any filmmaker, and the authors of The Lord of the Wind do not quite cope with it. Moreover, from under the beard and oxygen mask of Fyodor Konyukhov, the unmistakable voice of Fyodor Bondarchuk is heard, which gives everything that happens a shade of make-believe that is not interrupted by any visual effects and pathetic music by Alexey Rybnikov. Listening to the main character’s reasoning about God and how He directs him to the eternal test of his strength, all that remains is to nod politely and return to his boring worries, because we, ordinary people, are unlikely to be able to fly away from them in a hot air balloon.