Thanks to grandfather for the fret – Weekend

Thanks to grandfather for the fret – Weekend

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A series was released on the Ivy platform about how the nineties, in the form of golden Lada cars, left the garage again. Lada Gold, set simultaneously in two eras, is a strange road movie that resembles both a Russian folk tale and an oriental carpet.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

Back in 1999, an authority figure from Tolyatti – the legendary Midas, aka Misha Dasygin, played by Pavel Priluchny (for the occasion, he was decorated with a shiny fixie) – retired, to trample the zone. He puts his grandson Arthur to bed with a beautiful tale about glorious knights and an evil dragon, from whom they decided to pay off with a golden horse, and surrenders into the hands of the police. His departure is organized by a local opera captain, Ogurtsov, aka Armor-piercing, performed by Ivan Fominov (he got the anecdotal mustache from the makeup artists). Grandson Pashka is waiting for Ogurtsov in his official Lada.

More than twenty years later, Pashka and Arthur together will have to deal with the legacy in the form of that same knightly horse – the Lada Gold, an all-gold station wagon made in the depths of VAZ for the Moscow patrons of Midas and cut off during his arrest by Ogurtsov.

VAZ, Togliatti is, of course, good, but it gets Lada Gold on the road with the mention of another Volga brand. “From afar, the black Volga has been moving for a long time,” with the rap of “Caspian Cargo” in the radio and in a giant black Mercedes with license plates 999, the matured Arthur (Roman Evdokimov) returns from Europe to his hometown. With lingonberry bangs and an earring in his ear, he stands out too much against the general funeral background – Arthur is taken from the airport straight to the cemetery, where Midas is seen off in a luxurious two-door coffin. Simultaneously with his godfather, in the same graveyard, but much more modestly, the funeral service of the legendary opera Ogurtsov is also held. His grandson Pasha (Eldar Kalimulin) receives to inherit the very Lada that the entire gangster Togliatti, Midas’s accomplices and successors, as well as Kazakh partners and Moscow patrons are looking for. The plot of “Lada Gold” is a pursuit of this mobile treasure. Pasha and Arthur, who cling to him, are like koloboks fleeing from Grandfathers and grandmothers roll at full speed through the dark forest to meet face to face with its inhabitants – Shamray, Lysy, Buba, Kasym – but for the time being they make do with threats and bodily harm of varying degrees of severity.

For cinema, a fairy-tale narrative is a good way of plotting (it’s not for nothing that screenwriters study the works of Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp), but for the authors of Lada Gold, the fairy-tale structure of a Russian fairy tale or its characters alone will not be enough. They have a myth-making ambition, and the golden unit sometimes gets stuck under the weight of this ambition so tightly that it cannot do without the figure of a storyteller, a bahari, who must push forward the fantastic fairy-tale vicissitudes. Storytellers invade this movie, turning into episodic heroes. Hard workers, security guards – in general, people. Everyone is like one of the garage cooperatives where the golden car stood for 20 years, and, of course, they know how everything really happened. So, having seized the narrative initiative from the authors of the series, they colorfully sculpt such macabre and wampuka as flashbacks that any anecdotes from the nineties will seem like a documentary chronicle.

Gluing disparate tales together into a single stream is not an easy task and, most likely, not such a necessary task. It is more like a carpet, intoxicated with symmetry and rhyme, than some clear path from beginning to end. Forget about authenticity, forget about plausibility and even about the laws of physics (I wonder if the golden fret could really move?). “Lada Gold” moves exclusively along the patterns of the national myth towards the national dream. The first determines who we think we are, and the second determines who we want to become. But who can seriously distinguish one from the other?

It is not for nothing that the interior of the notorious Lada is covered with carpets immediately after crossing the Kazakh border, when history takes on completely grotesque features. In “Lada Gold” there really seems to be something oriental, something Indian: fathers and sons circle in a single round dance of mistakes repeated from life to life, without particularly thinking about dramatic motivations or psychological implications. A similar attempt to look at the nineties as a cyclical natural process was made by Roman Mikhailov in his debut “A Tale for Old People” – but he had more meditative thoughtfulness, hypnotic reflection, fatigue from violence and hope. But here, on the contrary, there is a lot of hysteria on the verge of screaming, shooting on the verge of singing, love lighting up like a match, and dancing with a tambourine (at some point a Kazakh shaman naturally appears in the frame).

In Lada Gold, as in Doctor Zhivago, everyone inevitably meets everyone. And one hero easily finds another in the middle of the desert, as if teleport had already been invented, and then he inevitably falls in love, so much so that you cannot tear him away and nothing can explain the nature of these feelings. It’s not easy to get used to the emotional pressure and degree of conventionality of what is happening, but, perhaps, if you give the series some time to accelerate (something suggests that golden machines do not do this quickly), it will be possible to even discern something in the plan at the end Shakespearean – Romeo and Juliet is at least in abundance here. On the one hand, you get used to everything (here, of course, it’s worth noting the cleverness of Ivy’s programming policy, where series are uploaded in their entirety), but on the other hand, try to get on this track at least until the fourth episode. Get there and don’t get tired of the frenzied jump in video formats (the picture is sometimes square, sometimes wide, sometimes in VHS filters, sometimes in black and white), wild screaming, violence that is Korean in spirit, and colorful acting benefit performances. Among the latter, it is especially worth noting the fat, on the verge of a foul, clearly parodic role of Daniil Vorobyov, who played a gangster terminator named Shamray, and Igor Chernevich, who joined in this murderous hypocrisy. Yes, the performers in Lada Gold are truly golden, but the rest of the details and, most importantly, the assembly, it seems, should be tested by time.

Look: “Evie”


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