Silent family secrets – Newspaper Kommersant No. 19 (7464) dated 02/02/2023

The international film festival in Rotterdam continues. The Big Screen Competition program hosted the world premiere of Natalia Meshchaninova’s film One Little Night Secret. About him and other important events of the festival tells Andrey Plakhov.

In the atmosphere of an international boycott of Russian cinema, released with the support of government agencies, the logo of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation turns out to be a surprise in the opening credits of Meshchaninova’s film. But this is a double exception. The financial participation of the Hubert Bals Foundation affiliated with the festival helped the film to get to Rotterdam. On the other hand, financing the bold project was probably the last feat of the Ministry of Culture: today it is already difficult to imagine such a thing.

Natalia Meshchaninova was unable to come due to a leg injury and presented the picture with a video recording from the screen. She said that this is a movie about domestic violence, which flourishes in Russia and is still surrounded by a veil of silence: the victims do not speak, and their mothers do not notice the sexual abuse of their children. She said that the film is very personal. She thanked the festival, with which her creative life is connected, for the invitation, emphasizing that it was “a difficult choice” for him.

The action is played out in a sleeping city microdistrict on New Year’s Eve. The people amuse themselves with firecrackers and gather in merry companies. Fourteen-year-old Mira hardly begs her mother and stepfather for permission to go to her two-year-old girlfriend and promises that “no boys and alcohol.” She immediately meets a handsome guy from Riga and impresses him with her fire-spinning skills. The girl is about ready to reveal some terrible secret to the “Baltic prince”, but in the end she only frightens him and the whole company with her recklessness. The answer is herd aggression – a motive announced in Meshchaninova’s debut film “Combine” Nadezhda “”, shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2014.

Actually, we learn about the little secret of the night in the very first scene of the film, which will be repeated in an exaggerated form in the finale. This is a very unpleasant scene, and one can imagine how disgusting it was for the actor Stepan Devonin to portray an abusive stepfather, the image of which his wife Natalia Meshchaninova first brought out in her autobiographical story, and then transferred to the film. But “Uncle Andrei” as a socio-psychological type is embodied as a sniper. To match him and a cheerful wife (Elena Plaksina), and her daughter, the main character of the World (Taisya Kalinina). Plus, authentic, as always with Meshchaninova, dialogues, plus the retro atmosphere of teenage parties of the 1990s, turning into the 2000s. In the Rotterdam hall during the screening of the film, laughter sounded more than once, the Russian-speaking audience reacted especially actively. And indeed, there is a lot of funny everyday life in the picture, but at times it becomes scary. Having touched the risky, painful area of ​​life, the director finds an emotional and artistic balance between “joke” and “guignol” that is difficult to achieve.

Despite the fact that the topic of domestic sexual violence has already bypassed the screens of all countries, from Romania to Argentina, its Russian version impresses precisely with its intimacy. The fact that it is solved not in the biased manner of the “agenda”, but as a private story, behind which a frighteningly universal subtext is revealed. After all, Mira finds so much indifference and cruelty in society that she prefers to return to her ugly family, where they love her “in their own way” and even worry about her. This, among other things, closes the vicious circle of dumbness and silence.

The motive of abuse also appears in the Iranian competition film “Numbness” directed by Amir Tudehrusta. It arises quite unexpectedly: at first, the picture resembles a paradocumentary essay about the everyday life of a kindergarten. Iranian boys and girls, only up to six or seven years old, can be in the same team, and even then they are always trying to separate them by gender. At their tenderest age, they amaze not only with beauty, but with a sharp mind and curiosity. At first, you are touched by their innocent games of “male-female” and disputes about where children come from. But gradually the film taxis to a more serious collision. One of the boys, Roham, who is closely watching his chosen one Rana, not only finds traces of beatings on her body, but also becomes a witness of how the stepfather gets under the girl’s skirt in the locker room. They try to shut up the boy’s mouth, but he manages to tell about what he saw during the kindergarten performance: he “rewrites” the role of Zorro in his own way, imitating the actions of the abuser on stage.

Iran is one of the countries that is in the focus of attention of filmmakers today because of massive violations of human rights. It is surprising that even in the face of fierce censorship, even within the framework of a “cute” kindergarten film, Iranians manage to raise the most pressing questions: from the clericalization of education to abuse. And a metaphor for the conspiracy of silence in a society of double morality is the instruction on brushing teeth that the teacher gives to the children. For those who do not keep their teeth clean, an inflammatory process begins and it is necessary to remove the root. Freezing is indispensable here, and it leads to the “numbness” rendered in the title of the picture.

In addition to Iran, Ukraine is prominently represented on the festival screens today. In the Tiger Competition – Philip Sotnichenko’s film “La Palisiada”. The untranslatable word – a soulless, meaningless bureaucratic “figure of speech” – is taken from the report of the investigator in charge of the colonel’s murder, which is hung on a person without sufficient evidence. This was the last death sentence carried out in Ukraine in the mid-1990s. In a whimsical way, this plot is connected with the modern one: adult children are hostages of the sins of their parents. Although the film shows the costs of a directorial debut, it is notable for its witty design and figuratively conveys the peculiarities of time and place — impoverished Transcarpathian Ukraine, mired in post-Soviet entropy.