Review of the film “Vacation in October” by Roman Mikhailov

Roman Mikhailov’s fourth film in a year and a half, “Vacation in October,” a phantasmagoria on the theme of cinema, is being released. Mikhail Trofimenkov I’m tired of looking for epithets for the doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, who burst into filmmaking at over forty years old: stunning, unpredictable, lawless, not dependent on anything or anyone.

You need to see how Professor Mikhailov, almost in the sports uniform of a street thug, comes out to present his movie: “Well, let’s rock the hall? Let’s rock it!!!” The only thing missing is the sacred question: “Where are your hands?!” The spitting image of a totalitarian sect guru. In the best sense of the word.

All his films deal, in one way or another, with faith in its most varied forms. In the seemingly criminal “A Tale for Old People” (2022), the long-bearded authority Dad, who sends three fighting sons in the genre of “go there, I don’t know where, bring that, I don’t know what,” is the spitting image of a sorcerer from the ancient Russian thickets. Around the same sorcerer, only weakened and dying, the action of the village drama “Legacy” (2023) was concentrated. “Snow, Sister and Wolverine” (2023) is the story of a ghostly telephone romance between a seasoned cop, transferred from drugs to extremism, and the prophetess of a certain “Living Church,” his potential target.

In “Vacation in October,” Mikhailov also talks about a sect, only professing a specific religion called Kino. It would seem that there is nothing new here. Why turn to cinema about cinema at all – unless there is nothing else to turn to, reality is uninteresting and disgusting. The filmography of the genre includes hundreds of titles. Among them are the poignant “Sunset Boulevard” by Billy Wilder, “The Voice” by Ilya Averbakh or “Contempt” by Jean-Luc Godard.

But there is one radical difference between Mikhailov and his predecessors: Wilder, Averbakh and Godard were members of the “film sect.” Mikhailov infiltrated it undercover and observed the film process simultaneously from the inside and outside. The reference books report that – in his scientific guise – he solved, whatever that means, “the problems of Bousfield, Baumlag, Lewin and Plotkin.” So in “Vacation in October” Mikhailov solves the “problem of Cinema” for himself. With the rational passion of a neophyte and the passionate rationality of the author of his doctoral dissertation “Homotopy theory of normal series in groups.”

The film’s dramaturgy – in its best, first half – is built on skillful and convulsive leaps. The action seems to stumble on the steps of the plot. You always expect the worst for the main character and are wrong every time.

The tired operative interrogates Sveta (Maria Matzel) and Lena (Anna Zavtur) about the disappearance of their friend, scares them with a drug test and generally scares them, as evil operatives know how to do. Opa-na: “Cut!” The dark scene turns out to be an episode of the seedy St. Petersburg TV series “Cops Under Ban,” where two not very talented friends are starring.

The paradigm suddenly changes. Lena and Sveta pass by, singing an idiotic song out of tune and out of place, a promising casting for a Bollywood film. Despite the fact that for some reason the film is being filmed near Petrozavodsk, the friends perform a dance of happiness, walking on the ceiling of a regular bus, carrying them to nowhere.

More precisely, in a tightly locked truck bed. The lucky starlets will be dropped off there to be transported to the set. Lena, prudently, it seems to her, will refuse to climb into the steel corral; the desperate Sveta will take the risk. It seems that the script darkness is thickening to the utmost, and the heroine will end up, at best, in a sadomasochistic brothel for vampires. But no: it turns out that it is in Bollywood, even if it has relocated to Karelia.

Another thing is that none of the participants in the filming of the dazzling musical about the Russian-Indian mafia and a girl kidnapped from her own wedding really understands what is happening on the set. Neither the director, nor the choreographer, nor the dancers. Not shaved men: either bandos posing as stars of Russian crime series, or specific stars of TV series looking like bandos. Their piles of cocaine and their guns – what are they, props or concrete coke and guns? There is no answer, and there is no need: this is a movie, bro.

The middle of the film is magnificent in its dance madness, in which Mikhailov, as is typical for him, involved a lot of famous people: from Andrei Bledny from the group “25/17” to theater director Giuliano di Capua, from writer Valery Airapetyan to the great cameraman Sergei Astakhov. Not to mention Mikhailov’s mascot actor, Evgeniy Tkachuk, in the role of a cool DJ, inviting Sveta to step onto the next risky step of the script.

Fortunately for Sveta, the invitation to take part in some night game again does not threaten her. Alas, for the audience, the last quarter of the film, as if suddenly for Mikhailov himself, who was proud of his cinematic innocence in interviews, turns into a game of David Lynch and Soviet production cinema of the 1970s at the same time. It seems that for Mikhailov “Blue Velvet” and some, relatively speaking, “A Man in His Place” are blasphemously equivalent values. But, goodness knows, he’s probably right. It’s a movie, bro!