The Mimino principle
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The colorful and textured actor Vakhtang Kikabidze could not complain about the lack of demand – in addition to the films of Georgy Danelia, he has a good one and a half dozen films of various calibers to his credit. And yet his career is sharply peculiar. About why her peak was the title role in the film “Mimino”, reflects Mikhail Trofimenkov.
Let’s not be hypocritical: Kikabidze was not an outstanding dramatic actor, and he never claimed this title. No, no, he was somehow doomed to a film career, both because of his fame and because of his courageous texture. The texture was successfully exploited by adventure films (“I, the Investigator” by Georgy Kalatozishvili, 1972). Who does not remember the insidious Mr. John Glubb, a CIA resident in the African state of Trasiland and part-time drug lord, from Vladimir Fokin’s film “TASS is authorized to declare” (1984).
The only one who creatively used Buba’s texture was, paradoxically, the Greek communist emigrant Manos Zacharias. In his film about the Spanish Civil War Alias: Lukacs (1977), Kikabidze recklessly played the anarchist leader Durutti. Enormous, clad in a leather harness, brave and catastrophically undisciplined, he led his loyal fighters in a suicidal attack and himself died from a shot in the back. An unfairly forgotten film, an unfairly forgotten role.
As for the exploitation of Buba’s pop fame, her calling card is Georgy Shengelaya’s “Melodies of the Veriysky Quarter” (1974). A sweet, sugary lubok-musical, where Kikabidze honestly worked out the equally sugary image of Pavle, a chaise-player, an unfortunate, sad-eyed single father.
Once again: although Buba was not a dramatic actor, he managed to become something incommensurably greater – a myth, an archetype, a symbol, the face of Soviet cinema.
And this happened thanks to a meeting with George Danelia. However, Danelia himself teased: it was he, the Russified Georgian, who became known in his historical homeland thanks to Buba. But the tragicomedy “Don’t Cry!” (1969), unique in its combination of rollicking fun and mortal anguish, overnight made Buba not just an all-Union star.
Sergo Zakariadze, the legendary “soldier’s father”, seemed to pass on the title of the number one Soviet cinematic Georgian on the screen to his hero, a young rural doctor Benjamin Glonti. No wonder Buba sang on the screen “Shen Khar Venakhi”, the very song that Zakariadze sang in Rezo Chkheidze’s film. It’s scary to say, but in the role of Dr. Buba, he put Jacques Brel himself on both shoulder blades, who in the same year played in the French adaptation of Claude Tillier’s story, the action of which Danelia transferred to Georgia at the beginning of the 20th century. Of course, he was an instrument played by a brilliant director, but what a sensitive instrument.
In total, Danelia and Kikabidze worked together on four films. But the dazzling adventurer Duke (“Completely Lost”, 1973) and the tired captain Foma Kalanadze (“Fortune”, 2000) faded against the background of the great Valiko Mizandari, aka Mimino (“Mimino”, 1977).
Valiko has become, if you will, the embodied symbol of Soviet internationalism and national identity. He combined in himself both national narcissism, and national self-criticism, and the worldwide responsiveness of the Georgian people. He loaded chickens on a helicopter and dreamed of snow-white liners. He changed his airfield cap for an elegant uniform of an international pilot. He wanted Larisa Ivanovna and was freezing in smart boots in the Moscow frost. Proudly paced the “pa-aerodrome” with a green inflatable crocodile and sang on the phone to an unfamiliar interlocutor from Tel Aviv. He did not like bad people to such an extent that he could not eat, and, leaving them, accidentally touched the chandelier with a chair.
And to the topical question “What was the USSR?” it is possible with full right, despite everything that Buba said about the USSR in the last years of his life, to answer: “It was Mimino.”
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