Review of the film “1993” by Alexander Veledinsky

Probably the most significant domestic film in many years was released. Alexander Veledinsky directed “1993” based on the novel by Sergei Shargunov about the civil war in Moscow in October 1993 between supporters of President Yeltsin and the Supreme Council. According to Mikhail Trofimenkov, this film is not only an unconditional civic act, but also a unique example of how hysterically tragic pages of still living history can and should be translated into the language of cinema.

In 1993, Alexander Veledinsky left his strong profession as a naval engineer to devote himself to directing. The act is completely suicidal, taking into account the agonizing state of Russian cinema. And the hero of Sergei Shargunov’s novel, space industry engineer Viktor Bryantsev (the best role of Evgeny Tsyganov), who left his fingerprint on board the Soviet lunar rover, sold his wife’s Moscow apartment and moved to the Moscow region. From where he went to the capital every day to work as a “ninja turtle” in an emergency crew of five men beaten by life, who knew the Moscow sewer system like the back of their hand.

Young Lesha Shumsky and Natasha Petukhova, very real characters depicted in the film as Sid (Grigory Vernik) and Nancy (Elizabeth Damasker), loved each other, sang songs, climbed and stalked. And then they carried medicines and candles through underground communications to the besieged White House.

The film and life brought the author, fictional characters and their prototypes together in Ostankino under the machine-gun fire of special forces. Or, as teacher Olesya (Victoria Smirnova), dying in Vitya’s arms, says, they were brought together by the desire to participate in history with a capital “I.”

The real Lesha and Natasha will die that night under cruel circumstances, the director will feel sorry for the screen Sid and Nancy – Veledinsky is generally a very kind author. Although the scene of the Ostankino execution is a kind of antithesis to the execution on the Odessa stairs from Battleship Potemkin. With Eisenstein, everything is solemnly arranged. Veledinsky’s is scary, dirty and pointless. The general thing is that the call to the “brothers” not to shoot, put into the mouth of the screen General Makashov, designated in the credits simply as General (Yuri Kotov), ​​will always be drowned in the roar of volleys.

Bryantsev will miraculously survive and in the final catharsis “beat swords into ploughshares”, making a gazebo out of coffins in his garden. And Veledinsky dares to make a film about how civil conflict is inexorably sweeping across the country, how division passes through families and friendly groups. The initially harmless chatter about who is for the “reds” and who is for the “whites” or simply for “private property” will turn into either an absurd fight or a well-timed swing at his wife. Wife Lena (the best role of Ekaterina Vilkova) will find herself on the fateful night at the Mossovet among the president’s supporters, along with a random and absurd lover Misha from Surgut (the best role of Maxim Lagashkin), who preached the neoliberal truths of Ayn Rand to the “scoops”.

The film is oversaturated with seemingly boring signs of the era. From the young wolf cub Yegor, eager to join the ranks of Medvedkov’s brothers, to the whores dancing to “American Fight” while waiting for clients. From the cops harassing Vitya in the police station to the albino cockroaches of Moscow dungeons. But this is by no means bullshit. Veledinsky’s heroes, in the most unworthy circumstances, remain people with a sense of their own dignity, do not survive, but live in spite of circumstances and yearn for “justice,” no matter how differently they understand it.

Veledinsky has an impeccable ear for the “noise of time,” including the musical background of the era. And the background was no match for the current one: “what kind of music there was, what kind of music sounded.” In the background, barely audible, are the hits of “Hummingbird”: “Orlandina” and “Yellow Autumn Leaf”. From the TV screen – “I’m going, smoking” by the group “Zero” and the purring of the future foreign agent BG about how “the communists caught the boy.” “Cuckoo” by Viktor Tsoi, which is sung on both sides of the barricades. Furious Yanka, Egor Letov, “Anarchist Battalion” of the “Mongol Shuudan” group. NOM’s brilliant hit “Choir of Entertainers from the Conductors’ Reserve” with lyrics, by the way, by Andrei Platonov.

This is exactly what Vitya is performing on screen in the street “glasnost booth” and the full emergency crew. The fact is that Veledinsky is an eccentric realist. He diversifies the action, either with this chorus of plumbers, or with a meeting with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky at the wheel of a lawless taxi, or with Vitya’s enchanting dance on the Moon in the image of Michael Jackson – the moonwalk – at the very moment when he is beaten in the police station. Jackson is just about to arrive in Moscow, and several storylines are tied to his anticipation.

What is the moral of the film? What could be the moral of the story? As the Strugatsky brothers wrote: “The animals stood // Near the door, // They were shot at, // They died.” Only here, at the promised door to a bright future, people stood, and they were shot at, and they died, without understanding why. And the first, and so far the only, tombstone for them, as the final credits say, remains the film by Alexander Veledinsky.