“The Tales of Hoffmann” by Tinatin Barkalaya has been released

On screens is Tinatin Barcalay’s feature-length debut, The Tales of Hoffmann. At a glance Mikhail Trofimenkov, the film would be titled “Diamond Hands”, and the director’s style would be “Handicraft”.

A haunting voice-over explains to the audience the specifics of one of the main characters: “Garik had a difficult relationship with women and alcohol. He knew no limits in either one or the other.” It takes me by surprise. What is this but a (un)free paraphrase of Vladimir Vysotsky’s song about the English spy John Lancaster Peck and his henchman Epifan: “Epifan seemed greedy, // Cunning, smart, carnivorous. // Measures in women and beer // He didn’t know and didn’t want to.”

Meanwhile, Garik (Evgeniy Tsyganov) is not a foreign intelligence agent, but an imposing second director of commercials, who asked – in one of the few truly witty details of a film that obsessively pretends to be witty – a designer friend to write a reminder on the ceiling of his bedroom: “I’m home.” A mattress is a mattress, a good man is a good man. Not cunning, not smart, not carnivorous.

In general, the voice-over, claiming to be the soulful intonations of the great master of this matter, Zinovy ​​Gerdt, is perhaps the main character of the fairy tale Tinatin Barkalaya. These texts can be quoted for pages: “She felt at least partly special. Beauty entered her life and required care and respect for itself.” Or again: “The clouding of perception intensified the nascent feeling.”

Is this a parody, designed to set aside the strangest story of the librarian and almost unexpected movie star Nadezhda Strakhova (Ekaterina Vilkova), her senseless, thick-haired and idle husband Vitalik, suffering from fictional “cryptoamnesia” (Maxim Stoyanov), and that same Garik? Alas, no, this is, apparently, a warming, lyrical tuning fork of the film, explaining to the audience what the director cannot or does not want to show with his own eyes. “Nadya fell in love”: okay, we’ve already understood everything without you, dear voice, but then what?

“The Tales of Hoffmann” pretends to be both a light tale about difficult times and a vague parable.

Difficult times are the very end of the 1990s, which, judging by the small details, dates the action. It’s funny that Vilkova and Tsyganov just played in Alexander Veledinsky’s film “1993,” where the same era appeared from its bloody side. But here all her signs are rather funny and harmless. The corrupt transformation of the library, where Nadya, who is in love with the dust of pages, handwritten forms and tanned bookshelves, works, into a karaoke bar. “Black cash”, earned by Nadya and stored by Vitalik in the freezer in a box with expired dumplings. The Tamagotchi was finally given by Nadia to her husband and from then on absorbed all the attention of this soulless domestic tyrant.

Tamagotchi, by the way, is not entirely politically correct called Aziz in honor of the son of Nadira, the reliable – in every sense of the word – servant of the Strakhovs (the impressive Nargisa Abdullaeva). And just as politically incorrect, Vitalik cheats on his wife with Nadira, justifying himself with the same fictitious illness: they say, I didn’t even notice who I was fucking with while the hell you were.

The supposed parable is that Nadya—let’s attribute this to the logic of the alleged circumstances—incredibly beautiful, graceful, cinematic hands. Since she also works part-time as a cloakroom attendant at the theater after library hours, Garik draws attention to her hands. He turns to him precisely at the moment when he is tormented by an insoluble creative problem.

Garik needs to film an advertisement for a certain bank, where the model uses, judging by the validity period, one of the first credit cards – and the star of the video allegedly has hands that are not capable of attracting any potential clients for time deposits. Therefore, Nadya ends up on the set, in the actor’s base of the hypothetical “Mosfilm” and the top “golden hands of all glossy magazines.”

From this moment on, the hands become dictators and, ultimately, the executioners of Hope. Such soft dictators. They force Nadya to wear mittens so as not to harm the temperature. Keep your hands up at all times so that the flow of blood does not disturb their supposed preciousness. Even to pacify the temper of Vitalik, who finally realized that only his wife’s hands give him a chance, without leaving the couch, to accumulate “green money” to buy a foreign car.

Everything would be fine, but what is metaphorical about it? After all, Nadya’s hands are not just parts of the body, but something more? A symbol of femininity, independence, sexuality, finally. But no, the hands remain just hands, and the whole film, as one of the characters angrily puts it, is “some kind of dismemberment.”