Review of the films “The Edge of the Broken Moon” by Svetlana Samoshina and “Hello, Mom” by Ili Malakhova

Two films are being released this week that seem to be in unplanned but inevitable dialogue with each other. Both premiered at festivals: “The Edge of the Broken Moon” by Svetlana Samoshina became the best film in the Moscow International Film Festival “Russian Premieres” program, “Hello, Mom” or Malakhova received a special prize for best actress (for Daria Savelyeva) in Vyborg. Both films are debuts, directed by female directors, and both explore the Russian phenomenon of the “same-sex family,” consisting of several generations of women, with men excluded from the brackets. And both, according to Yulia Shagelman, they do this with precision and subtlety not always available to more experienced colleagues.

In “The Edge of the Broken Moon,” directed from the script by Natalya Meshchaninova, the father figure still appears, and even before that, it was he who, without knowing it, triggers the events of the film. Fourteen-year-old Sonya (Masha Lobanova), who grew up without him, demands from her mother (Victoria Tolstoganova) information about her father, who left for America long ago. Having learned that he died, he runs away from home, unable to cope with his seething emotions. In fact, her father is alive, but her mother, who spent years trying to erase him from her life and that of her two daughters, does not want him to appear in her life again, even if only in the format of a video call. However, the younger one must be found and returned, and she calls for help the older one, journalist Sasha (Anna Shepeleva), who in fact also fled, only a long time ago: from St. Petersburg to Moscow, from a oppressive mother – to conditional freedom, from an eternally absent father – there where it will not be needed.

Two women and a girl find each other at the old family dacha, where they decide to stay: either to build fragile bridges to each other, or to throw out all the grievances and claims in their faces and burn them completely. Sonya, who has not yet matured to adult virtuosity in inflicting pain on her neighbor, gradually fades into the background, leaving Sasha and her mother in the foreground, locked in eternal sparring – and neither of them can break this connection. At the same time, Sasha develops something like a love affair with the handsome restorer Boris (Artem Bystrov), but it turns out to be an illusion, and the action is again confined to a purely female family circle.

In “Hello, Mom,” where Ilya Malakhova herself was the author of the script, the figure of the mother appears behind the scenes, also disappeared, but from the lives of her already adult daughters Kira (Daria Savelyeva) and Vera (Aglaya Tarasova). The second, although the youngest, is already the mother of a teenager Asya (Anna Osipova) and a younger schoolgirl Nyusha (Alexandra Evdokia Bakuradze). All four live together, in a small sister community, in which Kira is at the same time a beautiful holiday aunt (in contrast to Vera, who is overwhelmed by everyday life), and another child, and the formal head of the family: it is she who decides whether to officially recognize the deceased who left two years ago. mother at home, whether to sell her apartment, whether to move there, and so on.

Men are also secondary heroes for these women, although at first it may seem that the sisters’ lives are tightly tied to them, variable and fickle. Kira alternates between married lovers, trying to gather from three people one person she could rely on (of course, nothing works out of this, but perhaps Kira doesn’t really need it). Vera is waiting for a certain Tolik to be discharged from the hospital (but whether he is waiting for her is a question). Asya, as befits a sixteen-year-old, is in love, but her discerning aunt characterizes her chosen one (Artem Yakovlev) aptly and mercilessly: “You are the Baltic Sea, and he is the Baltic Seven.” Thus, attempts to find love and support, or at least their imitation, somewhere outside the native “woman’s kingdom” here also again and again end in a return to their native sister’s haven.

Mom remains a vague shadow on the periphery, but as long as she is present there, you can remain in the role of a little girl, for whose problems and difficulties the wrong adults are to blame. And how can you separate yourself from someone who left on her own without leaving answers or recipes?

In both films there are no positive and negative heroines, there are women alive in their imperfection, simultaneously right and wrong, unhappy in their own way – according to the precepts of the Russian classic, locked in a vicious circle of women’s fate repeating from generation to generation. But at least the ending of “Hello, Mom” gives hope that it is still possible to swim out from under the eternal ice of this heredity.