Tomorrow was she – Weekend – Kommersant
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“Actresses”, a deceptively light multi-part melodrama from the life of theatrical bohemia, made by the Psykha team, is being released on several Internet platforms at once. The script was written by Paulina Andreeva, Yuri Nikoghosov was in charge of the camera, and Fyodor Bondarchuk became the director. Like Psych, The Actresses is a bitter movie about space and time: the history of relationships and career take-offs of several metropolitan actresses captures the past eight years of our common life.
The favorite of the public, the star and the unfortunate soul of Hera Koldin (Alexey Makarov) for the 162nd time takes the stage of the State Duma Theater (the fictional Main Drama Theater) to play Zilov in Duck Hunt. The quiet rebellion of the intelligent, but pitiful Soviet man is given effortlessly. Hera himself, like Zilov, lives in a permanent midlife crisis, which is varnished with alcoholism and God knows what other addictions. The beautiful wife Polina (Svetlana Khodchenkova) – also, by the way, an actress from the same theater – fell out of love with him a long time ago and mostly spends time in the church choir; This couple’s next date should be at the filing for divorce. Hera’s mother regularly pastes over the walls with clippings from her beloved son’s interview and does not want to hear about crises. A flirtatious momentary affair with the violin (Anastasia Krasovskaya) from the orchestra pit does not really help to get rid of melancholy.
Everything shows that Koldin is not a tenant. But for the rest, life is no better. And the pious Polina, and her future admirer, the fashionable actor Stepan (Sergey Gilev), and Stepan’s ex-wife, the actress Alena (Elena Nikolaeva), and Alena’s friend, the eternal worker of the theater extras Oksana (Polina Pushkaruk) – in short, the entire theatrical party, including director Olga (Lolita Milyavskaya), director Gennady (Igor Zolotovitsky), everyone is somehow unhappy in their own way. And in a career, and in what is commonly called personal. Years go by, success is fleeting, ambition is insatiable. Here, neither Cannes, nor the prime-time series, nor the long-awaited appearance on the stage in the title role can make you happier. Even love is just a slight respite before the inevitable meeting with the curtain falling in front of the nose.
But the series by Paulina Andreeva and Fyodor Bondarchuk is not only about guild involvement in eternity, not only about how they personally love acting and its representatives. Almost more important than the characters here are the titles that mark the passage of time: all 10 episodes are divided into several acts, which are beaten off by numbers – 2014, 2017, 2020. I wonder what will happen after the covid quarantines awarded with caustic satire? But don’t we know? In this quiet movement down the spiral of the calendar – one of the heroes, perhaps, may even consider it as an ascent – at first there is nothing terrible or tragic. In the acting environment, everything is a bit of a performance, even grief. Well, of course, because “the whole world is a theater”, this impression is backed up by intricate musical scenes that complete each half-hour episode. In these final numbers, the director of “Actresses” seems to recall his clip-making past: the extras and the main characters dance to the songs, both new and old: from the classic Alla Pugacheva and Maya Kristalinskaya to the youth SBPC and Driada. Perhaps, I would like to eventually see a full-fledged musical created by the efforts of this creative group.
“Actresses” captivate with playful intonation, they are funny, playful and choreographically intricate, but behind all this carefully calculated lightness there is not only a lot of work, but also an extremely serious message. Both social (after all, it is curious to look at people who have taken a mirage as the goal of life), and existential. Momentary actions, gesture after gesture, add up to the irreparable, irony and laughter, concentrating, give away bitterness. After the first episodes, the chosen title seems a bit of a redundant gesture: why “Actresses” when so many men participate in this on-screen fashion show of vanity along with the heroines? The answer is obvious if you look a little longer: ridiculous, toxic men in a race of ambition are the first to leave the track. There is no time and no one else to bother with all these male complexes, conceit and self-destruction. Time is not for men.
“Actresses” is getting volume, with each new series step by step they are only gaining momentum, growing in meaning and at some point turning into a distilled statement about the passage of time. About how time destroys everyone. “This time is killing mom and dad on the sly,” Brodsky wrote in his “Representation”. A similar kind of performance is played by the “Actresses”. When Handel’s saraband from Barry Lyndon sounds closer to the finale in the series, the epilogue of this Kubrick masterpiece inevitably pops up in my head: “These heroes lived and quarreled during the reign of George III. Good and bad, beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, they are all equal now.” Only now the heroines of Bondarchuk and Andreeva, it seems, for the most part, are still alive. And this is a special tragedy – to look at yourself in the mirror, realizing that your time has come to an end.
Look: wink, “Kinopoisk”since March 30
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