Review of the film by Mikhail Mestetsky “Year of Birth”

Mikhail Mestetsky’s film “Year of Birth” was released, based on the epic story of the never-existent provincial punk band “Egg Light” and illustrating the thesis about loyalty to a dream despite time and circumstances. I watched the film Igor Gavrilov.

In domestic feature films, the topic of biographies of big rock stars has already been thoroughly worked out. There is a biopic of Yanka Diaghileva, two films have been made about Mike Naumenko, a film about the Gaza Strip is planned, and there is a whole series about the group The King and the Clown. Regional scenes have so far been poorly explored by filmmakers. But there, outside of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sverdlovsk, there were heroes. Enthusiasts record their life stories on paper. And now “Year of Birth” has arrived – a film about the punk band “Egg Light” and its fan Philip (Eldar Kalimulin), who set up a museum of the group right in his home. “The Year of Birth” is a fiction film, but at the end, next to the credits, they give VHS footage of the “Egg Light” group itself. This is how a film about how rock and roll defeats provincial dullness should look like.

But the “Egg Light” group still didn’t exist. Just as there is no city of Metallogorsk, where the film takes place. When you type its name into a Google document, the program underlines it in red and asks: “Perhaps you meant Teplogorsk?” No – and yes. And Teplogorsk, and Zheleznogorsk, and all Russian single-industry towns, where life looks something like in the film “Year of Birth.” And then there is the phenomenon of a big festival in a small town. Alfa Future People near the city of Bolshoye Kozino, “Wild Mint” near Bunyrevo, “Rock over the Volga” near Samara, “Chernozem”, “Fly Away”… But all this is music that was brought from the big world to the provinces. We placed the speakers a kilometer from the cowsheds and the tire shop, sang our favorite songs and left.

But Philip dreams of something else. This is Siberia, after all, and in Siberia there is an apocryphal “Siberian underground”, which in the film is the subject of irony and compassion. Philip dreams of a festival being held in his native Metallogorsk in honor of the leader of “Egg Light” Snot, with a huge chainsaw hovering over the field, and the name being “Mesh”.

There is a legend about such a group and its leader in any city where there was at least some kind of rock club. It is worth noting Yura Borisov, who not only accurately played Snot, but also sang for him in a wild voice, reminiscent of the St. Petersburg punk of the TaMtAm club era. The music of “Egg Light” was composed by director Mestetsky, also the leader of the Shklovsky group, together with Kirill Belorussov. Moreover, along with the hit of “Egg Light” “Hello, Marina”, they came up with Philip’s rap based on it, and an outright industrial underground, quite authentic in relation to the 1990s, and the epic final number “Son”. It’s hard to say whether the songs from “Year of Birth” will go down among the people like the songs from “Assa”; it depends on the fate of the film. But something can be heard in the new Shklovsky album.

Working with Philip’s dream of a rock Mecca, Mikhail Mestetsky takes the narrative to an almost surreal plane; it is not for nothing that the genre of “Year of Birth” is defined on Kinopoisk as “comedy, fantasy.” It would be worth adding “horror” – here heads literally fly off the shoulders, however, then they fall into place like a glove. Here tattoos appear naturally on the skin. And the “wonder element” invented by Snot, a device capable of finding music in any object, serves as a link connecting “Year of Birth” with “Assa” – with Bananan and his tube communication.

When creating his Metallogorsk, Tver resident Mikhail Mestetsky walked a very fine line, without sliding into either Balabanov’s hell or Astrakhanov’s oil. Philip’s mantra “everything will be fine” is a little different from “everything will be fine.”

“Year of Birth” can be called a film about a dream and a miracle that are born in places not suitable for this. Mestetsky says in an interview with Kommersant-Weekend that the main character is “trying with some incredible super-effort to help his wife produce a miracle.” But this wife herself, Marina, performed by Anastasia Talyzina, is a miracle worse than others. If you go down to mortal earth, “Year of Birth” is a film about a woman who tolerates her dreamer husband, because his dream is the only thing that helps her not to lose her human appearance among the panels, garages and “Red and White”. Marina’s look at Philip when he tells her about the “wonder element” and the Mesivo festival is a look that every man dreams of catching on himself at least once in his life.