Seven times and glue – Weekend

In the Russian box office, a strange almanac, made according to the rules of the surrealistic game “exquisite corpse”. It is difficult to call it grotesque, but you can get some pleasure from not quite Hollywood dramaturgy. Young, but already quite self-confident filmmakers worked on the film, led by Wes Anderson’s longtime co-author Roman Coppola.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

One day, Jane (Gillian Jacobs) decided to send her daughter to a summer camp and spend her free time aimlessly circling around Los Angeles. Visit old lovers, give a ride to a fellow traveler, get into an idiotic situation pouring coffee for yourself at the bistro. Everything seems to be random and strange, but what doesn’t happen in life, Jane thinks, but in fact, a whole team of authors is responsible for her misadventures.

Despite the seemingly collapsible construction of a road movie (anything can really happen along the way), The Seven Faces of Jane easily breaks down into seven, if not eight, episodes. Formally, this is an almanac film made by Roman Coppola as a contract producer and eight other cinematographers: Gillian Jacobs, Xan Cassavetes, Ken Jeong, and the most famous a person on this redundant list is Gia Coppola, niece of Roman and Sofia Coppola, granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola.

The titles of “The Seven Faces of Jane” assure the viewer that the authors, when creating their film, played the famous game “exquisite corpse”, invented by the surrealists in the 20s of the last century (the exact date of the appearance of the fun is unknown, but either in this or in whether she will be 100 years old next year). As an epigraph, the phrase “An exquisite corpse will drink young wine” is given – the result of one of the first games. The essence of the fun is in obtaining collective texts and images in the manner of a neural network – the authors pull the thread of the plot one by one, not knowing any details of the plan and, voluntarily or involuntarily, making excellent surreal nonsense along the way. Eduard Uspensky portrayed something similar when he forced Sharik and Matroskin to send the famous letter from Prostokvashino.

In the case of Coppola and the company, the “thread” was the main character played by Gillian Jacobs (this wonderful actress is familiar to a wide audience from the series “Community”). Her Jane, who seems to be a completely normal person, rooted in life, having handed over the child to the educators from the children’s camp, immediately meets her double – a waitress who clings to her hair because of some kind of criminal affair. This most successful and eventful novella belongs to the pen and hand of the most experienced of the authors of the omnibus, Gia Coppola. Further, the situation – if we talk about the level of surreality of what is happening – noticeably stabilizes. (However, it cannot be ruled out that for a modern person, a meeting with love from the past today can become such a strong shock that surrealists and psychoanalysts should deal with such injuries, they often go hand in hand.) Much more surreal looks like playing “exquisite corpse The authors still find time and energy for moral lessons and quite rational conclusions. This suggests that The Seven Faces of Jane boasts of its artistic method rather than seriously concerned with it. To pass for a surrealist in cinema, you need to be at least David Lynch or David Cronenberg, and even better Michael Bay. You have to be able to afford anything. In Roman Coppola’s project, on the other hand, melodramatic normality triumphs most of the time, not boring, but too comfortable to be the result of André Breton’s game. Perhaps, only at the end, when Alex Takach, who came out from under the wing of Bela Tarr, takes up the case, and Jane wanders into the Hollywood cemetery, where acting tests are taking place, the picture begins to give off something like a Lynchian dream.

Nevertheless, it is worth thanking the Seven Faces of Jane team for at least trying to break free from the tenacious clutches of three-act dramaturgy and Hollywood narrative cinema. The film, whose title seems to be something between “Seven Samurai” and “Seven Brides of Corporal Zbruev” (which, obviously, is not at all accidental), demonstrates how loyal the formal logic of presentation is in fact to filmmakers, how malleable the screen is to any nonsense, how tolerant of dramatic disharmony the audience is – if the circumstances and facial expressions are reliable, the magic of cinema is strong, and you can believe in any nonsense. Godard said that a good movie needs a girl and a gun, while Roman Coppola shows that a tolerable movie needs much less – a girl and a car in the coastal mountains of California. Watching close-ups of Gillian Jacobs is about as exciting as watching the changing landscapes – you would drive yourself and drive. And when this magic starts to get boring, the eternal saviors of cinema, choreography and music in the car radio come to the rescue.

In theaters from 24 August

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