Ten years after childhood – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
In the competition program of the film festival “Winter” – a new film by Gregory of Constantinople. The autobiographical Clipmakers is the story of the Moscow bohemia of the 90s, the author of which does not strive for any generalizations, but makes, as it seems, important discoveries.
1992, January. The USSR was gone a week ago. Cooperative cinema abolished all quality standards and thus turned the Russian audience away from domestic films. The profession of director has lost all prestige. Now in the field of audiovisual arts, the clip maker is king: people love pop stars, pop stars have sponsors, clips are the only way to bring beauty, the clip maker gets dollars in briefcases.
Grisha Byzantian (Alexander Gorchilin) is a promising clip maker. He rarely works so far, a couple of clips a year, but aptly: as soon as he appears on the set of Bogdan Titomir’s music video, he changes a couple of strokes – and the dull day job turns into a brain explosion. Grisha has a gun in his pocket – the dream girl has gone to another, richer one, and he is determined to solve himself. However, fate, in the person of screenwriter girlfriend Tonya Vodkina (Maria Shalaeva), will dispose of Grisha’s clip differently – she will release her into the bandit Beaver (Vladimir Epifantsev), who ran into her artist friend, who was careless enough to open the Juice-Water-Alcohol tent and refuse to cover himself . The beaver will magically survive – only he will not remember his “killers” at all: every time he will get to know them in a new way and every time for some reason he will come into conflict with them. And so the whole 90s will pass: clip makers will stab Beaver with a knife, choke him with a pillow, break chairs on his head with headsets, and he will come to his senses, again look for acquaintances with them and run after them with portfolios full of dollars – until by the end of the decade a bandit will not join the power structures. Those will need directors for election campaign propaganda, and Grisha, in turn, will need money to stage a full-length film.
Grigory Konstantinopolsky is a director, author, among other things, of the recent caustic series “Dead Souls”, where Gogol’s heroes were quite appropriately transplanted into our modern reality, and in the 90s one of the five leading clip makers of the country – in his new picture threw out the same trick that 13 years ago Pedro Almodovar in Broken Embraces. Almodovar came up with a story about the shooting of his old film, with which he became famous all over the world, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). In this fictionalized version, there was also a bandit, a big mafioso, from whom the director first took money for filming, and eventually stole the sweetheart (this whole line should have been read metaphorically – as an allegory of Spain in the 80s with its “movida”, the movement of all sorts of underground as creative , and social elements that arose as a reaction to 40 years of Franco’s dictatorship). But the shots and moments of the filming of that old film are almost an exact reconstruction: everything was almost like that, “like that, but not quite”, so that it was more interesting to watch and compare.
It’s the same with Konstantinopolsky’s film: the bandit, the stolen money and the sweetheart are rather metaphorical (certainly a bandit that you can’t take with a bullet or a pillow), but the scenes of filming the once famous clips of Presnyakov, Orbakaite, Lika Star (there are no such absolutely) and the debut feature tape of the Constantinople “8 1/2 dollars” (1999) almost literally reproduce the events of 30 years ago. Real characters will appear on the screen, who worked on the clips and the film, in the images of themselves in their youth – fashion designer Masha Tsigal, for example. The main characters are easily guessed by other main clip makers of those years – Fyodor Bondarchuk (here – Grisha Coppola), Armen Petrosyan (Armen), as well as the now respectable director Avdotya Smirnova in the form of screenwriter Vodkina. If they didn’t show anyone, they said about those: “Well, in short, this screenwriter is yours – I don’t understand at all what is her phenomenon? Like the city crazy? But in fact, a cunning, fucked-up woman. Well, this is vulgarity, absolute vulgarity! Her success offends me” – this is how the then-popular opinion about Renata Litvinova, whose voice Natalya Andreichenko spoke in “8 1/2 dollars”, was voiced in the film. People, songs, film images – everything is in place.
The two films, Spanish and ours, are also related by the fact that the 1990s, a decade after the collapse of the USSR, was our movement, our underground movement. And there were a lot of bandits, and dollars in suitcases, and lived in squats, and deep old women, as shown in Clipmakers, twitched in dances in the casino and on the podium (the underground artist and gallery owner Petliura had such a pani Bronya). But, of course, Avdotya Smirnova, even in her youth, when she really could dye her bangs and danced in the Dumb rock group, she hardly released a clip into anyone. Although, who knows, those were magical, unpredictable times, and in the morning you really woke up as a poor student in a hostel and smoked gobies, and on the same evening in the Sirena restaurant you received advances at the table from a Chilean music producer. However, this is no longer from the film of Constantinople – from my personal memories.
It is necessary to include the personal here in order to testify as an eyewitness: yes, that’s how it happened. The main value of this, as always in Constantinople, kindergartishly foolish and slovenly film, is that it captures both the air and the nerve of time. In a recent interview, the director said: “Today’s idea of the 90s and how it really was are two big differences.”
Firstly, here it seems that a clarification is required that the clipmakers are not talking about the 90s in general, but about the 90s in the life of Moscow bohemia (to the credit of the director, the film does not pretend to any generalizations). But the time was bohemian, the young were all with fantasies, so to a large extent the choice of environment also works on the image of the time as a whole. It was piercing and orphan, and this endless snow that snows to the song “Dolphin and the Mermaid” in the wind tunnel of Prospekt Mira near the Cosmos Hotel, while the old women sell rags right at the collapse, change dollars in the stall and release Amaretto, and prostitutes huddle at the entrance of the hotel – this is both an image of a homeless time and a completely realistic recreated picture: my personal daily route in January 1992 passed there, and I can swear – this is exactly that snow and that song.
Secondly, although Konstantinopolsky chose clip makers as heroes for autobiographical reasons, the then music videos were an ultra-accurate format for describing the state in which we all existed. In those ten years, our videos and our society were in exactly the same relationship as, for example, Bombay cinema and Bombay poverty. Salaries were delayed for half a year, factories were closed, food on coupons, cigarettes without a filter are sold as sausage – cut it yourself. We were the same Bombays, except that (contrary to what the famous song says) we didn’t walk naked down the street – and then only because of the mentioned eternal blizzards. And on the TV screen – gold-diamonds, kill the wall, Shah Rukh Khan! Kristina in scarlet brocade bares her leg in tango, Bogdan juggles with a golden-headed cane, Lika basks in satin linen under a canopy, Volodya meditates in the middle of winter in a field of fresh tulips – and everyone sings about an unprecedented, outlandish, eco-friendly thing: tango for three! This contrast did not evoke irritation, but precisely the same feelings that the Bombay cinema has in the Bombays: a fairy tale is nearby – stretch out your hand. Just as only a thin fence separates the Bombays from the studios of the Juhu district, so we were separated from Christina and Volodya, from the pavilions where all this beauty was filmed, just a few meters, and we thought: if this is possible today behind this wall of the VDNKh pavilion, tomorrow it will be maybe in my backyard.
Thirdly, and most importantly, what Konstantinopolsky’s film speaks about is that these clips were not made by cynical people, on the contrary, their sugary imagery was fueled by Soviet nostalgia. Soviet childhood was indeed the happiest in the world, and people went into adulthood without much worries: it was not possible to go to the abyss, to remain hungry, work was guaranteed. The generation of the 90s was the first to be thrown into new realities – but they have not yet realized this; the chicken also runs for some time after its head is cut off. The film has a wonderful scene-quote from One Hundred Days After Childhood (1975) by Sergei Solovyov, when Grisha takes his new model girlfriend Gelya (Kristina Vedeneeva) to Bitsevsky Park on a bicycle. Grisha is wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of Tatyana Drubich biting an apple in a wreath of wild flowers and with the book Lettres d’amour, which adorned the cover of the Soviet Screen, Gel is wearing almost the same wreath, only worn over a hat. Mis-en-scene, dark bottle-green shade – everything is adjusted to Solovyov’s pioneer camp idyll. “Grandma used to take me here for a walk,” says Grisha. “It’s hot, I drink water from a flask, it smells like plastic. And here we were on rafts with the boys. Motherland, in short.
And the turmoil with politics into which the heroes will throw themselves in the late 90s is a completely real thing. They boasted of them – and not only because of the money, but because over that decade we managed to get used to the fact that everything in the world is a joke: writing presidential speeches or shooting anti-KGB videos on order is also a joke. It was here that they made a big mistake, and in the finale, in October 1999, the director releases a clip already in his main characters. Konstantinopolsky filmed the shooting scene on the very spot of Berezhkovskaya Embankment, where Armen Petrosyan died in the fall of 1999, not only filming the video “Tango for Three”, quoted in the film, but also playing one of the main roles in “8 1/2 Dollars” (his the car broke through the fence, and he died from hitting the water and the bottom of the river). Probably, the death of a friend and colleague was the end of a carefree clip-maker’s youth for Konstantinopolsky. But even though this scene should be read, of course, metaphorically – neither Smirnov, nor Konstantinopolsky, nor Bondarchuk, of course, was shot by anyone, thank God – this spectacular finale seems superficial. After all, there was no metaphorical execution. It’s just that along with the 90s, youth was leaving, or, as they sang during our childhood, “there was no sadness – the summer was just leaving.” Today, the generation of clip makers of the 90s is already at the age when they urgently want to return to the days when they ran a horse. Konstantinopolsky in his Clipmakers did it literally, Smirnova in his Vertinsky did it figuratively, drawing a portrait of the bohemia of the 1910s.
The 90s were a special time, and we were a special generation. Not exceptional, not better or worse than others. It’s just that then we were the newest, latest, extreme, but no more. We merge into the general stream of generations, our voice is less and less distinguishable in the roar of all other voices. Konstantinopolsky tried – before it was too late – to isolate, to enclose in a separate capsule of the film this special voice of our generation, from which only a handful of video clips remained.
Cinema “Artistic”, December 7, 21.00
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
