The film festival of Russian cinema continues in Vyborg. Review of the first films of the competition program

The 31st Russian Film Festival continues in Vyborg, formerly known as Window to Europe, but now simply called Vyborg. He tells about the first films he saw in the competition program Yulia Shagelman.

The festival opened with a painting by Oksana Bychkova “Nina” – a not very successful attempt to reproduce the intonations of her directorial debut “Peter FM” almost twenty years later. A voice from the past bursts into the prosperous life of Nina (Yulia Peresild) with her beloved husband (Kirill Kyaro) and little son: her former lover Ruslan (Evgeny Tsyganov) reports that he is terminally ill and invites him to say goodbye to Tbilisi, with which their common happy memories are connected . Arriving there, Nina is convinced that Ruslan, who at one time, apparently, inflicted more than one spiritual wound on her, if he has changed, then only for the worse, and then also the husband, who is ideal at first glance, begins to arrange scenes of jealousy on Skype. It saves a frustrated woman from insecure nedomachos – but not the audience from boredom and not the film from sprawling at the seams – except perhaps the tourist charm of Tbilisi.

Much more interesting than the languid melodramatism of “Nina” was the scandal associated with it.

Already after the premiere, Oksana Bychkova hastened to disown the film, saying that producer Ekaterina Filippova had taken away her right to final editing and spoiled everything, she responded with even sharper accusations of unprofessionalism. In the heat of these passions, it seems that everyone has already forgotten about the film itself.

In the debut work of Ili Malakhova “Hi, Mom” men are relegated to a very distant plan. The focus here is a family of four women. Kira (Daria Savelyeva) works at the airport information desk and flits through life, starting relationships exclusively with married men, but secretly dreams that one of them will finally lower her to the ground and tightly tie her to him. Her younger sister Vera (Aglaya Tarasova) makes meatballs in a restaurant and constantly worries about children, money, repairs and a certain Tolik lying in the hospital. The eldest daughter of Vera (Anfisa Kaftanova) is busy with her first love and other teenage problems, and the youngest (Alexandra Evdokia Bakuradze) is still small, so for now the main troubles in her life are only broken toys and quarrels with her sister. Above all this, the ghost of the mother of Kira and Vera hovers, who disappeared two years ago, and before that for many years did not communicate with her daughters, but managed to psychologically traumatize them for the rest of her life. The film has excellent acting work and a lot of accurately noticed expressive details, but, alas, they form a single whole only at the very end, when it is already too late to get emotionally involved in what is happening.

“Sleepwalkers” Yuri Moroz is the first, as they say, audience film in the Vyborg program (it was made with the support of the Ivi online cinema). His main character is a woman again: an unbending business woman (Victoria Isakova) with an incomprehensible business, big money, an indifferent ex-husband (Aleksey Rozin), a young lover, a bad poet (Dmitry Chebotarev), and a son, a drug addicted rapper (Stepan Belozerov). She decides to get rid of this last addiction by subjecting him to a dangerous experiment in “psychozombing”. The result turns out to be unexpected, but it’s not even he who is most impressive, but the musical numbers that the artist Bojiy Dar composed for the film, and the authors’ ideas about modern youth are no less fantastic than the brainwashing story itself.

Another nod to the general public – “Octopus” Alexei Stepanov with the popular actor Daniil Vorobyov, who played as many as eight roles. A well-known psychologist gathers four clients (Sabina Akhmedova, Maria Mironova, Anfisa Chernykh, Natalya Rudova) for a session, during which he mentally transforms into their husbands, boyfriends and even drivers. Thus, the doctor wants to solve his own problems in relations with his cheating wife (Daria Mazurova). The film seems to be supposed to demonstrate Vorobyov’s acting range, but confirms that boorish gopniks work best for him.

In general, the tape evokes a feeling of acute embarrassment for all those involved, which, however, was clearly not shared by the Vyborg spectators, who laughed merrily and even applauded the jokes. In this sense, the focus on genre diversity and recognizable faces on posters can be considered a success.

“Lisbon” Svetlana Filippova again turned the festival towards the arthouse in its most simplified sense. This is an emphatically beautifully filmed and deliberately slow black-and-white drama about a family broken by divorce, proving the director’s excellent watchfulness. It is possible to stray from the calculation of cinematic influences: there is the French New Wave, and Tarkovsky, and Kira Muratova, and everything else – except perhaps the original author’s view and the ability to clearly tell the story.