“To love Ranevskaya is not easy” – MK

To make a film about Ranevskaya means to invent her again, to add another drop of myth. To play Ranevskaya means to become a shadow of that real magnificent non-banal actress that cannot be repeated, one cannot be a copy of her.

You need to love her first, that’s all. And it’s not easy. When she appeared in the theater, everyone fled, in all directions, because to fall under her sharp word, in the mood – mind me, mind me. Brought to tears, yes, and the attendants, and the great masters. When the almighty God and Tsar of the Mossovet Theater Yuri Zavadsky during a rehearsal shouted to her in their hearts: “Get off the stage!”, She (no one even had time to blink) immediately gave him: “Get out of art!” Cut off. And this despite the fact that Zavadsky idolized her.

She spoke fluently in spoken Russian. And she didn’t like hypocrites. “There is an ass, but there is no word,” she threw out to the astonished audience an immortal aphorism of her own composition about the fifth point, the basis of everything and everything, and even those who frowned in disgust when pronouncing a public concept aloud.

Such a Fufu (as Ranevskaya was called in the theater behind her back, meaning her grandmother constantly puffing on a cigarette – “Fuf, fuf”) had to be accepted, understood, loved and noted. Director Dmitry Petrun and three screenwriters at once – Larisa Zholobova, Alina Semeryakova and Yuri Moroz – succeeded, agreed. Such an immersion in the life of Ranevskaya with all the nuances, deviations, quirks, triumphs and tragedies came out. Or rather, they, of course, built, blinded from what was, they invented Ranevskaya, put their own accents. Fufa is a woman, that’s what they were interested in first of all. Not even like that: Fufa is a beautiful woman, impeccable, with all her contradictions, bells and whistles. Ranevskaya is a daughter, Ranevskaya is a sister who lost her parents forever after the tragic October break of 1917. This irretrievable loss in many ways is the explanation of her self-defense of eccentricity, quarrelsomeness, total and cherished by her, guarded loneliness.

But to love such a character in the image of a character, an actress – “Spring” – this is not enough. Even taking on the main role the wonderful, stylish Marietta Tsigal-Polishchuk is also not enough (although there, in heaven, mother Lyubov must have been so happy for her daughter). From Marietta in the picture, radiance emanates, some kind of special warmth. But even this is not enough. About time and about oneself, that is, about it a rockfall (starfall?) of lived years, eras – how to show this? Pre-revolutionary Ranevskaya (then still Feldman), and these are the first three episodes – in my opinion, luck. Because there is detachment, which means an opportunity to look at this life from the outside, to give a perspective, the necessary optics of all this decadent absurdity from the Silver Age. But the Soviet context is already separate stories, sometimes not connected with each other, where time flies away, evaporates, and the plot, and with it the main character, exists, as it were, in the airless space of the entourage of a fictional life that has disintegrated outside the context of pure realism. Perhaps the authors wanted to show the very essence of hovering over the world, over the life of Ranevskaya, but the miracle did not happen, it did not happen.

Yes, they didn’t make a comic old woman out of her, Freken Bock, thanks for that. And they even showed her famous: “Pioneers, go to hell!” – to the joyful exclamations of children: “Mulya, don’t make me nervous!” But they didn’t show how Brezhnev, awarding Fufu, a three-time winner of the Stalin Prize, with the Hero of Socialist Labor medal, also addressed her as those “pioneers” (this Mulya was given to everyone!) … No, she did not send the Secretary General to that very famous place, and affectionately spanked in a bass: “Leonid Ilyich, well, you’re just like some kind of bully.”

They did not show how she sits in the dressing room, stripped naked and smokes. Then there is a knock on the door, the director of the Moscow City Council theater enters (according to another version, it was Rostislav Plyatt) – and Fufa instantly: “Is it okay that I smoke?”

And how Ranevskaya stumbled on the sidewalk, fell, lies and turns to passers-by: “Well, pick me up, folk artists don’t lie on the road.”

And they didn’t show about “whom you are friends against”, and about “spit into eternity”. I understand that they did not want to make one continuous anecdote from Fufa out of the series. Well, well done, but excessive sentimentality does not suit this sharp-minded woman either.

Her friendship with Akhmatova, with Pavla Wolf is a special article, a song. And she brought special young actresses closer to her, of her own cut – Elena Kamburova, Marina Neyolova, and she nailed Iya Savvina with a “mixture of a rattlesnake and a bell” – after all, Ranevskaya could have been called that.

I sent money in envelopes to everyone and everyone, I didn’t even have to ask for it. No, she was not lonely, of course: she lived with Pushkin Alexander Sergeevich, he materialized in her small apartment, and the old mongrel Boy, whom she picked up on the street. The door in her house was never closed, this was in case of another heart attack, so that the neighbors, if anything, could hear and help.

All her comedic episodes went to the people. Many of these films have already been forgotten, but everyone remembers what Ranevskaya was like. I’m lying, not everyone, those who were born in the 21st century may not even know who Ranevskaya is. Yes, a shame, but “I have no other writers for you.”

And she has only two true, really big dramatic (no, tragic) roles. In the cinema, this is Romm’s pre-war film “Dream”, where she played a Jewish mother from Polish life in such a way that US President Roosevelt, who saw this, without wiping tears from his eyes, called Faina the world’s greatest actress. And at the theater – “Further – silence”, where she shines with her eternal partner Rostislav Plyatt, and the whole audience cries at the end. Although Plyatt himself (here it is, the cynical and ironic nature of the artist) said that people come to the theater to look at Fufu, like a giraffe in a zoo. Well, so be it, look, people, and learn while she was still alive.

In old age, Ranevskaya became very beautiful. There is such a type of women, here is also Galina Volchek. You look at her in “Further – silence”, you can’t take your eyes off. And in her last interview, which she gave a year before her death to Natalya Krymova, Efros’s wife, Fufa is unusually charming. And there is no “rattlesnake”, but only one “bell”. “Faina Georgievna, why did you move from theater to theater so often?” Krymova asks. “I was looking for sacred art.” – “Found?” – “I found it. In the Tretyakov Gallery”.

“She flew away, but promised to return. Sweetheart, sweetheart…”

… I wanted to write about the series, but it turned out about Ranevskaya. Only about Ranevskaya. Sorry.