The series “The Librarian” scared and laughed
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Nikita Efremov became the star of a romantic-combat fantasy
Eight episodes of The Librarian went on the air immediately after the broadcast, and in the all-at-once mode. The very idea of showing the series in one day seems very controversial, but in this case, such a quick immersion in the long-awaited fantasy could cheer up both fans of the genre and just curious ones.
Mikhail Elizarov’s novel “The Librarian” immediately after its release in 2008 seemed like an ideal work for film adaptation. Mysterious books, bloody clan battles, nostalgia for the USSR – all this presupposed a spectacular and ideologically demanded visualization here.
Nostalgia for the USSR in 2023 is a little strange, because the pretty forgotten retro is returning in all its glory, and what in the 2000s was memories (often idyllic, having nothing to do with the truth of life) about that distant life, now almost in newspaper editorials. But most viewers of The Librarian watched, most likely, for the sake of completely different emotions.
The protagonist, a young actor played by Nikita Efremov, is going to leave for Hollywood and, in order for this venture to have a financial background, he wants to sell the apartment he inherited from his father in a provincial town. But instead of a quick deal, the actor gets into a rather creepy mess. It turns out that his father was a librarian, collecting rare books, the reading of which turns the townsfolk into formidable warriors.
Moreover, there are quite a lot of such librarians, each of them put together a gang of “readers”, and all of them are ready to fight to the death among themselves because of the books of the writer Gromov. Worthless socialist realist writings from the seventies, when properly understood, give unprecedented power, and collecting all Gromov’s books means getting everything from life.
After the series is shown, of course, there will be those who are indignant about the free treatment of the original source and the attempt to make a commercial TV product out of the book, which, as its fans probably believe, includes spiritual rebirth. And some of the purists’ fears were generally confirmed.
The film adaptation was unloaded without too much reverence in terms of some storylines, but added romantically. In the original, the heroes of The Librarian lead a completely asexual life – in their ideological struggle there is simply no time for shura-mura. But a series without melodrama is almost impossible for us, so it also appeared in combat fantasy.
With the latter, it turned out surprisingly cool. People are slaughtered without any mercy, and the post-Soviet entourage in the form of quilted jackets, sharpeners made of rebar, armor made of linoleum and other outright trash gives everything that happens some kind of correct absurdity, which, of course, is good for fantasy. The line with “enlightened” grandmothers from a psychiatric hospital balances on the verge of horror and black comedy and brings everything to a light and very appropriate madness.
There are different opinions on the appropriateness of Nikita Efremov in such scenery. In the frame, he is again an intellectual who finds himself in strange circumstances. But, despite the fact that the actor played such characters, and repeatedly, Efremov again became one of the locomotives of the plot. Call it luck or a flair for projects, but over the past couple of years, not a single project has appeared in Nikita’s filmography that can cause exceptionally sour mines.
Among the surprises should be noted the role of Mikhail Trukhin, who became famous after the “Streets of Broken Lights”, and recently often plays in slightly the same type of comedies. In The Librarian, he is the apparatchik Shulga, who has turned into a caricatured villain with the makings of a dictator. Trukhin was hard to imagine in this role, but in the end he surprised, and in the best possible way.
Mikhail Elizarov, before the start of filming, shared his hopes that the best techniques of Soviet cinema would be used in the series. However, the result was a completely non-Soviet movie, but with a very Russian outcome: among the two worlds, the ordinary and the book-mystical, it is very difficult to understand which one is more terrible.
Newspaper headline:
How do I get to the library?
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