Review of the film “Air” by Alexei German Jr.

A film by Alexei German Jr. is being released. “Air” about young female pilots of the Great Patriotic War, which participated in the program of the 2023 Tokyo Film Festival. According to Yulia Shagelmanthe film represents a rare example of the anti-war anti-blockbuster genre for Russian cinema in recent years.

One of the largest military-historical film projects was announced back in 2018, when director German Jr. represented him at the Cinema Fund. At the same time, an impressive budget of 450 million rubles was announced, a certain part of which was made up of non-refundable government funds. The Vozdukha team began filming in January 2020, and then they were hit with troubles: first, a pandemic and a forced shutdown of production, then political events, due to which they had to abandon the idea of ​​filming real planes of the 1940s in the Czech Republic, a change producers and studios. And as a consequence – an increase in that very budget, the final figure of which is now not even disclosed.

Instead of real airplanes, full-size models and rockets were eventually used – they look especially beautiful not even during scenes of air battles, but on the ground, standing in sunset/dawn/clear daylight on the shores of Lake Ladoga, where the action starts, or in the steppe below Stalingrad, where it is transferred in the second third of the film. These shots of the Yaks silent under transparent camouflage nets are repeated as a constant visual refrain, emphasizing the fact that throughout the entire film the director of the patriotic war epic is fighting in Herman Jr. with a director of the direction that is usually called the art mainstream (although the only thing from the mainstream itself is the participation of popular artists – Sergei Bezrukov, Elena Lyadova, Anastasia Talyzina), and the latter wins with a crushing score.

The film begins with a terrible scene: German fighters are shooting at a convoy of trucks with refugees coming from besieged Leningrad (it is the cold, frozen spring of 1942). Dirt, blood, groans of the wounded, dead children’s bodies – it is clear that the reference points for “Air” are such films about the war, which were shot by the director’s father Alexei German or, for example, Elem Klimov. However, everything that happens is painted with Herman the Son’s signature dusty gray-beige color correction and immersed in fog, which will spread across the screen regardless of the time of year and the geographical point to which the war takes the heroes – whether to the Baltic, the Volga steppes or Belarusian forests. Both create, intentionally or not, the effect of a coldish detachment, as if instead of the destinies of living people, old faded photographs are flashing before us.

They show very young girls who have just graduated from flight school and have never been in real combat. Katya (Aglaya Tarasova) is from the village, Masha (Kristina Lapshina) is from a prosperous Moscow family, Marika (Yulia Shishova) is Georgian, and we learn even less about the rest. All the attention of the screenwriters (the director himself and Elena Kiseleva) is given to Zhenya (Anastasia Talyzina), whose backstory is revealed gradually. At first she is just a frightened girl, unable to shoot at a living person, even if it is an enemy, but then she has a biography in which she has parents who were executed “enemies of the people”, her renunciation of them and change of name, rape by an orphanage teacher, voluntary registration front, to atone for their guilt, but at the same time to honor the memory of their father, the pilot-hero of previous wars.

All these are painful, uncomfortable things, which are heard less and less from the screen, especially in films with government funding. But just as the horrors of war turn out to be blurred by a dim, foggy picture, so the emotions of the characters dissolve in some deliberately invented scenes (what if a baby suddenly appears in the cockpit of a fighter? What if the heroine shoots a colleague who tried to rape her, but instead of hushing it up case, someone else will selflessly take her blame? What if everyone constantly threatens each other with a tribunal?) and unnatural dialogues that the actors pronounce in the same mechanical, almost intonation-free voices. Perhaps this technique should denote the psychological defenses that people build for themselves who deal with death every day, but it evokes associations rather with bad theater or artificial intelligence, the growing dominance of which in cinema is so concerned about the foreign colleagues of German Jr. And, despite its humanistic message, the film “Air” turns out to be surprisingly stuffy.