Review of the film “Deranged” by Ilya Malanin

“The Abnormal” is being released, the directorial debut of actor Ilya Malanin, which opened the “Spirit of Fire” film festival in Khanty-Mansiysk this year. The film, carefully filmed in a student-like manner, takes a rather naive approach to the topic of disability, but also contains a reasonable idea about the need for timely separation of parents from grown-up children. Moral progress in domestic mass cinema is stated Julia Shagelman.

At first glance, the synopsis of Abnormal is reminiscent of Mikhail Raskhodnikov’s film Temporary Difficulties, which was released in 2018 by the same film distributor, the Central Partnership company. There, the father, played by Ivan Okhlobystin, cured his son of cerebral palsy through humiliation, psychological violence and taking him alone into the forest to meet a bear (well, and a little more gymnastics and exercises). As a result, the son became a successful business coach. In the film by Ilya Malanin, the stepfather, played by Alexander Yatsenko, also miraculously cures his adopted son of an incurable disease – mitochondrial myopathy, and he becomes a talented pianist and composer.

True, Abnormal can be considered a symbol of progress, which over the past six years has somehow imperceptibly occurred in Russian mass cinema. There is no violence in the methods of the hero Yatsenko, the ship engineer Yuri, who firmly believes in the same gymnastics and exercises as opposed to pharmacology. He sincerely loves the boy Kolya (Elisey Svezhentsev) and in his home-grown therapy follows his inclinations and desires – for example, having noticed Colin’s interest in music, he makes it the key to their joint activities. Moreover, when the boy annoyedly calls himself “abnormal,” Yuri delivers a convincing monologue about how normality is greatly overrated: after all, “normal” people, like Kolya’s own father, who abandoned his family as soon as his son was diagnosed, do not keep their promises , deceive and betray, considering all this to be the norm. Disability does not make Kolya any different – although the authors still do not see any other happy ending for him than a miraculous cure.

However, the matter is not limited to the latter. The line from the past, in which Yuri teaches Kolya to ride a bicycle and play football, while gradually paving the way to the hearts of his mother (Natalya Kudryashova) and grandmother (Nadezhda Markina), whom it turns out to be the most difficult to win, is intertwined with the modern one, in which he grew up and Nikolai (Illarion Marov), already completely healthy, comes to Shanghai with his stepfather for an international piano competition. Here a new point of tension is outlined in the picture: the selfless love of his adoptive father, which once served as Kolya’s support, now begins to limit and stifle him.

Having encouraged the boy’s independence in childhood, his stepfather stubbornly refuses the young man even its simplest manifestations. For example, he insists that he should not walk around Shanghai, but sit in his room, study, clearly see the main goal in front of him – to win the competition and not be distracted from it by foreign beauties and a pretty Chinese translator with the Russian name Anna (Xu Shiyue ). Here the authors use a simple but intelligible metaphor: while other participants in the competition are enthusiastically improvising, Yuri demands that Kolya play Chopin exactly as written, without deviating a single note from what he considers the only correct sound.

Thus, a story about overcoming turns into a story about a conflict between generations, which is nevertheless quite respectful – the heroes only once allow themselves to raise their voices at each other. Now Yuri no longer has to fight against doctors’ verdicts, but against his own hardened beliefs and expand his view of the world, allowing into it the initially frightening thoughts that foreigners do not necessarily want to deceive or set you up; that Chopin can be played in different ways; that an adult, who his adopted son has become largely thanks to his care and work, can make his own decisions and be responsible for them. And only by accepting all this and allowing himself to let this person into his own life does he finally become his real, unnamed father.