The last film by Sergei Puskepalis: snow and doom
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Lonely heroes appeared at the new Moscow auteur film festival
The festival was opened by the documentary film “Balabanov. Bell tower. Requiem” Lyubov Arkus. Being a talented film critic, she has already shot several films and has now made a farewell film. May 18 marks ten years since the death of Alexei Balabanov. Arkus calls him “the only truly folk director of the new Russia.” They were connected by many years of friendship, and therefore an ultra-short distance became possible.
We definitely have not seen such a Balabanov. Perhaps the specter of imminent death, which he knew about, made it all possible. Lyubov Arkus is trying to disperse the foam that whipped up around Balabanov after the events of this year that changed the world, when they began to look for the origins of what was happening in his paintings. In the first part of the film, she tries to explain a lot, to say things that are important to her personally, that phrases were torn out of the context of his films and appropriated by those who interpreted them at their own discretion, that Danila Bagrov is the protector of impoverished Russia. It’s kind of like a film history essay.
And only then will the stream of life rush inexorably moving towards death. We become eyewitnesses of how the last days of Balabanov passed, until May 2013, when he died. Having learned that the doctors are letting him go for a year and a half, he decides to shoot the film “I also want”, where the group of Lyubov Arkus went after him. And we follow them, and all this is reminiscent of the “Chronicle of the Declared Death”, when the whole world is watching the approach of the end.
Aleksey is giving a tour of his apartment, showing the room where his wife Nadya’s mother is lying, eating soup in his bedroom. At some point, a frame from the past appears on the screen – Balabanov is sitting on the couch with his tiny son. It seems that this is the sofa with which he was awarded in the 90s at the Literature and Film Festival for the film adaptation of Kafka’s “Castle”. He looked ugly, but then it did not seem so to us; besides, as Balabanov’s wife Nadezhda Vasilyeva said, he helped them out a lot at that time when they lived very modestly.
Following Balabanov, the group of Lyubov Arkus goes to Serbia and Kostroma, where he came from a nearby sanatorium to choose nature. Dropped shoulders, stooped back against the backdrop of the winter landscape of the ancient city, which Alexei just fell in love with, but did not have time to take off. And one more strong impression is connected with a meeting with young arrogant people in a bookstore. They laugh at Balabanov. For them, he is a strange grandfather. And he admits that he does not consider himself happy. It would seem that he had the opportunity to shoot what he wanted, thanks to his friend and producer Sergei Selyanov. And the family was wonderful: two sons, a beautiful and sensitive wife … But some kind of melancholy ate, stuck out like a splinter and eventually led to the dilapidated Bell Tower of Happiness in “I also want”, in which Balabanova’s hero – in fact, he himself – and accepted death in the snow before the one that came for him in real life.
In “Doctor” by Artem Temnikov, based on the novel “Doctor X and His Children” by Maria Anufrieva, we are also waiting for the death of a strong hero. Death is stronger than life. Again snow and doom. This is one of the last films in the biography of Sergei Puskepalis, if not the last. In any case, he managed to voice it a couple of weeks before his tragic death in an accident. Something has changed in the schedule of the actress and co-producer of the film, Olga Zirsen, and Sergey has agreed to participate in dubbing ahead of schedule. Now the hero’s passages through the snow-covered Yaroslavl, his retreating figure in the park are stuck in memory for a long time. Much in the face of tragic death is perceived differently and fills the film with new meanings.
The hero of Puskepalis runs the department where the problem children are. Some of them imagined themselves almost a new Hitler, draws a swastika in a notebook, I am sure that the Fuhrer knew how to put things in order. Some of the little patients are not averse to tormenting kittens and sister, strangling a neighbor in the ward. The doctor with the fabulous surname Khristoforov has a non-standard approach to everyone. He is sure that the role of poetry in psychiatry is underestimated, and is ready to prescribe poetry as a medicine. The main trouble of problem children is their parents. Khristoforov is sure of this.
Sergei Puskepalis in this role, which ended his career, seemed to return to the film “Simple Things” by Alexei Popogrebsky, which opened him as an actor. There he is also kind Aibolit, and his conversations with an elderly patient performed by Leonid Bronevoy suddenly became so important for many. As if this is the same doctor, except that he has matured a lot. At home, Khristoforov’s mother with Alzheimer’s (she was played by the actress of the Volkovsky Theater, which was directed by Puskepalis, Elena Susanina), is always with a friend who is able to understand and forgive. But no one canceled the fatal loneliness. A person is left alone with fate and is unable to cope with something that torments the soul, which prevents one from being happy. Probably, this is a talent, the hostage of which inevitably becomes the one to whom it is given.
Newspaper headline:
death in the snow
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