Syrup conquers evil – Newspaper Kommersant No. 155 (7356) of 08/25/2022

The feature debut of Ekaterina Veshcheva “Lena and Justice”, filmed in the ancient Russian city of Kashin, was released. The director proved to be a worthy student of Andrei Konchalovsky as the author of “Ryaba the Hen” and “White Nights of the Postman Alexei Tryapitsyn”. Mikhail Trofimenkov at first he felt sincere sympathy for the heroes of the small screen tragicomedy, but then he thought that the director was playing with reality and with the audience as a giveaway.

Who in the city of Kashin does not know Lenochka: Lena (Anna Ukolova) is known to everyone. The saleswoman of the local general store, a boy-woman, will stop a galloping cop by handing him – and there is nothing to rat about – a kilogram of rotten sausages. And the local “authority” Plotnik (Vitaly Kishchenko) will be hit with his hands on his hips so that at the turning point of his actions he will forget his Masonic nonsense, unexpected for a provincial thug, and immediately become yellow and fluffy.

In general, Lena embodies the best features of the Russian national character, including internationalism. For ten years he has been living in a civil marriage with a Tajik angel in the flesh Maksud (Parviz Pulodi). He is both a Swiss, a reaper, and a gambler on the pipe: freed from construction work or duty at a car wash, he prepares a delicious dinner for the whole family. The soul does not like that in the eldest daughter of Lenin from her first marriage, that in their common guys. One trouble. For ten years, Maksud somehow manages to live not only without a Russian, but without any kind of passport at all. In this connection, the local cop Vitya (Alexander Oblasov) regularly represses him, in line with other illegal immigrants, and Lena just as regularly redeems him, not failing to tell Vitya the people’s truth-womb about “damned life” every time.

Justice, on the one hand, is that justice that does not coincide with an unjust law and which all Russian people theoretically yearn for. On the other hand, this word could be written in the title of the film with a capital letter. The same Carpenter calls himself justice, somewhat confused, however, in his philosophy of life: “There is no justice! Justice is me. Excuse me, what is it.

The initial arrangement of figures on the screen and the problems stated by Ekaterina Veshcheva suggest that the director, as boring critics of the social-critical direction would write, chose the outback as a mirror in which the problems of modern Russia are reflected. Maqsoud dutifully suffers from a disenfranchised status and gets hit on the head by a xenophobic gopota. Gopots, however, who “come in large numbers” to a much greater extent than Maksud: the Plotnik’s fighters will not give offense to their “chock”. And Lena habitually curses “stability”, about which the media buzzed her ears. Vitya, timidly wiping his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief, curses the local “guber” who, in political interests, rounds up guest workers. In general, all the leaden abominations of Russian everyday life are, as it were, evident, but precisely what is “as it were”.

The fact is that Lena and Justice turns out to be not just a fairy tale, but a fairy tale staged in a puppet theater. The red-brick town, moderately charming, moderately neglected, is an ideal scenery in which the passions of living pupae are played out. Each of the characters, with all the persuasiveness with which the actors work, is not a full-fledged character, but an embodied function.

Maksud’s function is to endure and sigh. Lena’s function is to shove with a drill, to take a sip: he would have written “enter the burning huts”, if Maksud had not entered the burning hut, that is, the beer pavilion set on fire by him, rescuing the black-haired Guzal (Sabina Akhmedova) from the flames. The Carpenter’s function is to make faces a la Malcolm McDowell, listen (that’s what strange bandits we have in Russia!) “La Traviata” and broadcast about justice. Viti’s function is to be ashamed of his own venality and unsuccessfully fight with a coffee maker installed in the area as part of a renovation. The function of Tanya (Yulia Bedareva), Lena’s general store comrade and local Marilyn Monroe, is to be bitchy in moderation. The puppetry of the film is accentuated by the presence on the screen of the trinity of “Shakespearean” jesters or, if you like, the ancient choir. The homeless Vovan (Nikolai Schreiber), Kolyan (Aleksey Shevchenkov) and What’s-his-there (Sergey Neudachin) resemble Gaidai’s Dunce, Coward and Experienced, only irrevocably drunk.

The problem with the film is that everyone, in supposedly real circumstances, turns out to be monstrously unreal good people. That gangsters, that cops, that drunks, that guest workers, that trade workers form a kind of new historical community – the “Russian people”. And they take bribes in a kind way, and set fires not out of malice, and, having sinned, they repent, and forgive those who have sinned.

It would be great if real reality obeys the laws of the screen. But, after looking out the window after watching the film, I want to exclaim in amazement: why are you sometimes so evil, if you are so kind in your soul.