Thirst for Peace – Weekend – Kommersant
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Drama by Natalia Meshchaninova “One Little Night Secret” has become a participant of the Rotterdam Film Festival and has just been shown as part of the Big Screen program. In the new film – partly a screen adaptation of her own autobiographical prose – Meshchaninova does what she does best – skillfully combines documentary and poetry.
What a secret it is, it becomes clear immediately when the hero – a smooth, thoughtful man under forty – gets up in the middle of the night from the matrimonial bed and puts a New Year’s gift on his stepdaughter’s pillow. Stepdaughter, Mira, is 14 years old, and she wants to spend New Year’s Eve with a friend, and not with her mother, stepfather and one-year-old sister. Honestly, mom, there will only be girls, we’ll sit and play board games. Mom, happy and fucked up, as only mothers of one-year-old children are, is ready to let go, but her stepfather is against it: he remembers well what kind of board games interest teenagers. But then he changes his mind and lets go. A friend will not have any tables, but there will be random friends, a bottle of something amusing, a fire show in a wasteland, hopes and disappointments that happen only on the New Year, only at the age of 14, only for a girl who writes in her New Year’s wish: “I want him to die.”
The new – and, obviously, the best – film by Natalia Meshchaninova (“Nadezhda Plant”, “School”, “Heart of the World”, “My Mom’s Penguins”) – seems to be about domestic violence as part of another, greater violence that the world at any second dumps on a teenager under the guise of concern: a friend explains that such a “collective-farm, provincial” nose, like Mira’s, is easy to fix, a visiting fireman promises to take Mira to the coast, although in reality he just wants sex (and who doesn’t want to?), her parents pull her, as if she were on a leash, then they give her a little freedom, then they pull her up again. But all Meshchaninova’s films, including those where she was only a screenwriter (“Arrhythmia”, “Anna’s War “”), are not reduced to a plot, to dialogues, to a conflict, even to space. Something else is important in them: a lump in the throat, or a cold in the stomach, or flashes instead of a heart – something animal, something human.
“One Little Night Secret,” which can be told much more readily than “Nadezhda Plant” or “The Heart of the World,” still remains closed, remains a secret. It cannot be reduced to the problems of a fourteen-year-old girl (Tasya Kalinina), who spends the viewer through “playing with fire leading to a fire”, through falling in love, disappointment, hatred, indifference, hangover. he talks, only the earrings sparkle in his ears, and on New Year’s Eve he calls his two daughters from a previous marriage, one of them is pregnant. comfort”) does not play a monster, not the ruler of the world, not Uncle Sasha from the petty bourgeois story “Desire” – “a cheerful angry miserable maggot”, although the plot of the film partly echoes the story. Devonin’s hero is a man who it’s convenient to lead the world on a short leash: he lowered it a little, then pulled it again, forbade it, allowed it, gave an expensive gift, shouted: well, open it already, look what’s there.
The world generally behaves this way, and fourteen-year-old girls know it best. Natalia Meshchaninova surprisingly retains this teenage rage, which was noticeable even in the series “Alice Can’t Wait”.
It is impossible, of course, to resist and not to pun: this is a film about the heart of Mira. So, but not so: no one is interested in her heart. Only physics, physiology. About “Heart of the World” Meshchaninova said that fear is one of the film’s matters. In The Secret, the main matter of the film is thirst. A mixture of longing, desire, hope and hopelessness – this is the feeling that always happens on New Year’s Eve. This is the feeling that always happens on the morning of January 1st. Unquenchable.
You can probably see a more global statement in The Secret: here is the male world, which operates with fire, bribery, violence, then there is the female world, poisonous, unkind, and you will also have to fight with it all your life, gentle, seemingly always ready to take a nap – but not ready to listen and help. But the strength of The Secret is in its honesty, that is, in the absence of globality, metaphors, conclusions; realism, almost documentary (Meshchaninova started as a documentary filmmaker) in the development of characters is combined here with the ability to see the magic of the world, to feel the poetics of spaces. The Dardenne brothers work with characters in this way, with space and air – probably Wong Kar-wai. The result is a small night cannonade.
Meshchaninova captures petty family explosions, the birth of hatred from a family idyll. In her book of stories, there is a moment of “the great paradox of love and blindness” when mother and daughter once again converge to “not open wounds, not to speak, not to remember, not to touch the terrible, not to wake the bear, not to draw swords.” There is a moment in the movie too. And it becomes scary not when on the screen they scream, beg, drink, say: “I won’t be anymore”, want to be no more, but when mother and daughter happily look out the window, where January 1 is slowly unfolding – and another year begins to roll into the sunset.
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