Thaw talent – Newspaper Kommersant No. 4 (7449) dated 01/12/2023

Screenwriter Natalya Ryazantseva has passed away. She was 84; being a professor at VGIK, and before that a teacher at the Higher Screenwriting and Directing Courses, she brought up several episodes of screenwriters.

Once, speaking about the cinematic change, Natalya Borisovna complained: “I watch so many theses, and somehow I somehow …” She did not say “bad”, “do not like”, and, however, the feeling of dissatisfaction was understandable. She had nothing to compare to. Talent flourishes when the spirit of the times and competition favor it.

Ryazantseva herself studied at VGIK with the master of screenwriting Yevgeny Gabrilovich. Vladimir Valutsky, Pavel Finn and Gennady Shpalikov, who became her first husband, also studied there. They were a very beautiful couple. Nearby are Larisa Shepitko and Elem Klimov (another cult couple), Andrei Tarkovsky and others: the generation of “children of war” and “flowers of the thaw”. Their marriage with Shpalikov turned out to be “experimental”, student: he quickly broke up when faced with everyday life, but at the same time there was love and, no less important, a sense of camaraderie and generational community. They led a bohemian life, and in parallel there was a creative one: one fueled the other. At the same time, the softening of the general atmosphere did not exclude both denunciations and political cases. The course where Ryazantseva studied was dispersed. Her peers matured and tempered not in greenhouse conditions, and yet a powerful new wave poured into the cinema.

There are 18 films in Ryazantseva’s filmography, three of them are outstanding. Two of them were filmed by female directors – “Wings” by Larisa Shepitko and “Long Farewell” by Kira Muratova. The third, Alien Letters, was staged by Ilya Averbakh, Ryazantseva’s second husband and a refined master of the Leningrad school. In all three – poignant female images. Today’s feminist boom seems to be oblivious to what women did in film a few decades ago. Then the “female look” was not discussed as an alternative to the male, the criterion was talent, and only he. Ryazantseva met this criterion one hundred percent.

The significance of her work for cinema, not only Russian, not only thaw, is extremely. Her sensitivity to realities, her harsh and precise manner of writing, her moral intransigence (“You can’t read other people’s letters!”) largely determined the artistic style of the time. It seemed that in recent years she has existed imperceptibly, because her era – the sixties and seventies, Shpalikov, Shepitko, Averbakh, Muratova – has passed. But it was loyalty to the era and its cults that became its form of independence.

When times, culture and style changed radically, Ryazantseva kept a noble conservatism. We ended up with her at the 1988 Venice Film Festival. She was a member of the official jury that awarded the script for the film “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” by Pedro Almodovar. He was not yet a classic, and Ryazantseva called him “Buñuel for the poor.” And she also said: “There is one brilliant episode in this film, but we don’t have such a prize, we had to pay for the entire script …”

It cost nothing for her to admit, for example, that her common favorite Sergei Parajanov, with whom she was in close proximity at that very Venice festival, was alien and unsympathetic to her. But she could say this in an interview, when she was asked, because she was a direct person. However, she did not impose her views on anyone. She could appreciate a lot, but falling in love is a completely different matter: “I don’t like American cinema too much … I mean, you never want to revise it, it’s very well done, but since you know everything right away … But they turned it into an industry wonderfully. Of course, we won’t have this, but maybe, thank God.”

With Natalia Ryazantseva, the aura of the “Leningrad school” and that cinema that was Soviet and anti-Soviet at the same time left. Maybe that’s why it lives, and even now, when everything seems to have lost its value, it suffices for the soul.

Andrey Plakhov