Seven troubles – one neighbor – Newspaper Kommersant No. 158 (7359) of 08/30/2022

Stefan Rick’s The Good Neighbor, a film set in Riga, was released. According to Mikhail Trofimenkov, if the film is at least something interesting, it’s just one episodic role.

It’s hard to imagine a title both more banal and less related to a particular film than “Perfect Murder”, as the distributors dubbed Stefan Rick’s opus. For perfect murders, one should still turn to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” or Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Scaffold”: the legendary old men have not yet been re-draped like that. And here, by and large, there is not even a murder: so, an idiotic accident. Random buddies David (Luke Kleintenk) and Robert (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) accidentally knock down Janine (Ieva Florence), a cyclist drunk on a night highway, whom David had previously met at a nightclub. They shot down and overzealous in concealing evidence, having made all the mistakes that are unacceptable even for amateurs. For example, when the car that was run over was reported stolen, they didn’t even bother to notify the owner of the vehicle, Grant (Bruce Davidson). Which, for a second, is David’s employer, the editor-in-chief of some pretentious American media, published in Riga for an unknown purpose.

On the other hand, if the film had been released under the original title “The Good Neighbor”, it would have made no sense to watch it at all: the title itself is a pure spoiler. If in a thriller someone is recommended as a good neighbor or neighbor, it is clear in advance that we are talking about a fiend. A kind of spoiler – and the choice of Rhys Meyers for the role of that very “good neighbor”. David, who moved into the house next to Robert’s cottage and turned to him for technical assistance, should not have gratefully accepted a canister of gasoline from him, but with a wild cry, run, run and run again into the nearest forest. It is written on Robert’s face in advance: a maniac is waiting for you in the gateway, and this maniac is me, and in general, I like you, cutie, and you can replace my non-existent brother. But bloody crime reporter David has apparently never watched a psychopathological thriller and is voluntarily climbing into a trap.

Jean-Luc Godard’s reasoning that the plot and shooting style of any film, regardless of its quality, is a metaphor for the director’s manner, involuntarily comes to mind. The anti-heroes of Stefan Rick do all their bad deeds carelessly, as if yawning, as if striving to quickly end the painful process of fleeing from justice. So Rick himself takes off his sleeves, flat, without the slightest spark of any, but inspiration, as if getting rid of a heavy duty.

The only thing that could give interest to the intrigue was the scene – the exotic city of Riga. However, this place is only indicated by a couple of panoramas on the city roofs. With the same failure, the action could be played out even in Hanoi, even in La Paz. The titular nation is represented only by the investigator Yuta (Guna Zarinya), wearily and intently forcing David to look away guiltily during interrogations.

Otherwise, Riga seems to be a city inhabited exclusively by American expats: journalist David, nurse Robert, girl “in search of herself” Janine and her sister Vanessa (Eloise Smith), who does not know what she does. The streets of old Riga are no different from any old streets of any European city. Nightclubs, trout lakes and country cottages – from exactly the same clubs, lakes and cottages in every corner of the world. One can only admire the ability of Stefan Rick to photograph a completely “foreign” city without noticing anything in it that is at least somewhat original. Well, or consider this approach to nature as a manifestation of American cultural imperialism.

Meanwhile, in “Perfect Murder” there is something that allows you to think about the frailty of everything, including acting glory, and recall the great Soviet Baltic cinema. Among the episodic victims of the “good neighbor” is a certain Mrs. Petrova, a patient of Robert, who became – a hacky scenario move – an accidental witness to a night accident. So, her 70-year-old actress named Regina Razuma is playing.

The dazzling star of the Riga music hall, she retrained as an actress in the 1970s. Her most memorable roles to Soviet viewers are the girlfriend of a noble robber from Sherwood Forest in Robin Hood’s Arrows (Sergey Tarasov, 1975), the main character of the medieval action film Olav Neuland’s In the Time of Wolf Laws (1981), the KGB investigator in The Right to Shot (Viktor Zhivolub, 1981), an exemplary Cold War frontier thriller. Regina Razuma generally played a lot in political films: “Unfinished Dinner” (Janis Streič, 1979), “The Match Will Take Place in Any Weather” (Roland Kalnins, 1985), “The Pack” (Arvo Kruusement, 1985), “Last Report” ( Dzidra Ritenberg, 1986). Fought, in general, fought her heroine with world imperialism. And as a result, Mrs. Petrova died on the sidelines of genre cinema at the hands of a Yankee expat in a film shot on the crest of a new Cold War.