The festival of contemporary Russian cinema “Mayak” continues in Gelendzhik

The Mayak festival of contemporary Russian cinema continues in Gelendzhik. He talks about the films included in his competition program Julia Shagelman.

The “pilot episode” of the festival, the founders of which hope for its long life, opened with Mikhail Mestetsky’s film “Year of Birth.” Its main character, Philip (Eldar Kalimulin), is a passionate fan of the punk band “Egg Light,” which rocked his native Metallogorsk in the 1990s. He dreams of giving the city a new life and making it famous throughout the world by organizing the Mesivo music festival – a grand tribute to the entire Metallogorsk underground. But love unexpectedly gets in the way of the dream – the tender and amazing daughter of the head of the meat processing plant Marina (Anastasia Talyzina), having become pregnant by Philip, gently, but still insists that he become an adult and responsible.

The film, like its unlucky hero, has an undeniable charm that is difficult to resist. It contains many witty moves, heart-warming references to “Assa” and the free spirit of the 1990s, as well as irony characteristic of our time, even less suited for dreamers. At the same time, surprisingly, there is a lot of optimism. True, at this festival of disobedience, a woman is given the role of a patient muse, whose desires and dreams recede into the background before men’s, until they finally merge with them.

A kind of rhyme to “The Year of Birth” was “Red” by Semyon Serzin: also the story of a dreamer and his stoic wife, but based on real material – the life of the Sverdlovsk poet Boris Ryzhy (writer and musician Evgeniy Alekhine). The authors, however, strive not so much for biographical accuracy as for creating the image of a “damned poet,” whose tragedy in any century and country grows from the very fact that he is a poet. The Ural 1990s, of course, give the story its own specificity: Serzin does not romanticize them, although nostalgia, which can be described in the words of Ryzhy himself “how well we lived badly,” is still felt in the film.

The main character is supported by a whole gallery of supporting characters (Sverdlovsk writers and bandits are played by Evgeny Serzin, Evgeny Tkachuk, Oleg Ryazantsev, Oleg Vasilkov, Ryzhey’s wife – Taisiya Vilkova, Oleg Garkusha makes a short but memorable cameo). Some techniques already look a little hackneyed (how many times can one illustrate the breakdown of eras with Boris Yeltsin’s New Year’s address “I’m tired, I’m leaving”?), but overall the portrait of the poet against the background of time and time against the background of the poet turned out to be very convincing.

Another thematic and stylistic pair at Mayak were the films “My Invisible” by Anton Bilzho and “Contacts” by Dmitry Moiseev. This is handmade low-budget science fiction, which, according to the festival’s program director Stas Tyrkin, “in Russia for some reason always turns into a tragedy… like other genres.”

The action of both films takes place in depressive provincial cities, the centers of which were once scientific institutes. An employee of such a research institute from “Invisible…” disappeared many years ago – his wife (Daria Ekamasova) is sure that he went through a black hole into another dimension and is sending signals from there. So she refuses to forget him and move on, much to the irritation of her teenage son (Sergei Gruzinov), who enrolls in a military-patriotic circle in protest. A completely typical Russian conflict – an incomplete family, a silent figure in the place of the departed father – turns into a viscous author’s exercise, full of distorted shooting angles and heart-rending blue color, unmerciful to the viewer.

The premise of “Contacts” is the message that in the 1980s, alien “biopogs”, popularly nicknamed Vitaliks, landed on Earth and, in particular, in the USSR – this event and its consequences are shown in flashbacks, stylized as Soviet scientific pop. But something went wrong, and in our time communication with aliens is prohibited. And one such “Vitalik” is kept in the laboratory of a dying science city and subjected to cruel experiments. The only one who treats him humanly is his laboratory assistant Nina, who at first, like everyone else, uses him, but then tries to save him. “Contacts” probably cannot be called a spectator film either, but they were made so inventively and non-trivially that they may well become a cult film among cinephiles.

Veniamin Ilyasov also took up the theme of age-old female loneliness and the desire to attach one’s soul to at least someone, albeit strange and/or not very worthy of this affection, in his “Era,” which demonstrates the debutant director’s great love for Pedro Almodovar and Kira Muratova. True, in his performance, the story of Era (Marianne Schultz), who settled by the very blue sea with her son in a wheelchair (Gennady Blinov) and in vain looking for love and warmth from a series of peculiar personalities, comes out loose and shallow, so neither bright red visuals can save her accents, nor brave acting performances.

“Long Dates” by Georgy Lyalin is also a story about love, not only human, but also divine. Oleg Garkusha here plays an elderly Orthodox priest on staff, whom the diocese sends to seek repentance from a deaf girl (Vasilisa Perelygina), convicted—innocently, but the authors somehow don’t dwell on this—for burning down a church. Almost like in an Indian film or a Mexican TV series, he recognizes her as his daughter, only not by blood, but by spirit, whom he once baptized in that same burnt temple. Imbued with sympathy, the priest gives her a few moments of normal life, and then a real miracle. But the best quote from this Christmas story is still remembered: “Spiritual bonds are the basis of the penal system.”