Unfree swimming – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
The Flood, a cruel chamber tragedy by Ivan I. Tverdovsky based on the story of Zamyatin, was released – a film for which one will not be ashamed.
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s story “The Flood” was filmed twice, both times in the 1990s; the only time, it seems, when both producers and viewers could be interested in the story of a forty-year-old Petrograd housewife, out of jealousy, hacked her adopted girl with an ax and, quite in the traditions of the madness of this city, dismembered her, and then happily became pregnant. Both film adaptations – both the literal version of Igor Minaev (1997), filmed in French co-production with Isabelle Huppert, and the earlier “The Beast Coming Out of the Sea” by Vytautas Žalakyavičius, symptomatic for its time, which showed a sincere interest in both the romance of decadence (described in the literature), so to the horrors of ordinary decline (outside the window). Both the romantic glow around the heroes of Žalakyavičius living in sensual timelessness, and the naturalistic mud of Vasilyevsky Island in Minaev’s film served as an equally appropriate backdrop for the plot of excess, transgression, sweeping away all the flood of feelings — a theme so beloved by Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Recall that Zamyatin’s story takes place in the 20s, the crazy time of the total TCP, NEP and the sexual revolution, and the bloody ax in the hand of a Soviet citizen, with all literary allusions, is the same real sign of that time as the grandiose flooding of the city that came out in 1924 from the banks of the Neva.
The new, third film adaptation of The Flood is directed by Ivan Tverdovsky, a director who is clearly less interested in the Russian literary tradition than documentary realities. Accordingly, the film has much less to do with it than … well, let’s say, with the Chubarov case – another hellish plot of the Leningrad criminal chronicle of the 20s. On top of Zamyatin’s plot, Tverdovsky draws his own scheme of quotations and allusions, and this is not “Crime and Punishment”, multiplied by Pushkin’s motifs (in Minaev’s version, an equestrian statue of Peter appears for a reason), but a dissected “Scarecrow”, already without a kind grandfather-philanthropist, without happy ending, with real sexual violence.
The action of this “Flood” takes place in the closed space of a country boarding house with several pools, including an open one. Here, under the supervision of a childless pair of coaches Sofia and Trofim (Anna Slyu and Maxim Shchegolev), a mixed team of high school students trains; it consists of the mute Anya, Sophia’s niece, an orphan who lost her ability to speak after her mother’s death. Anya runs with the guys to the sauna (the film begins with an official investigation of this incident), she is also looked after by a positive boy from the team – but, in accordance with the text of the original source, only one person is definitely having sex with her. Sophia’s husband, Trofim.
For all its shocking relevance (this story looks like a familiar crime chronicle), “The Flood” does not look like it was filmed “on the topic of the day.” If the literal adaptation of Zamyatin’s story looked organically in the 90s, then the film shot by Tverdovsky seems like a bomb from the very beginning of the 2010s. It would naturally have stood on a par with To Live and Portrait at Twilight and other films of that decade that blew up the “new quiet” arthouse of the 2000s with a howl of pain and despair. But the cruelty of what is happening in the frame is balanced in Tverdovsky by the conventions of scenography; and the worst thing here is not the scene of murder or rape, but the “physical” play of Anna Slue, whose face becomes literally plastic material, through which waves-convulsions of hysterical grimaces run. The space of the rest home, surrounded by a night forest, seems to be hanging in space, isolated from the country, the world, the planet (a characteristic detail is that even farewell to the late Anya takes place in the same sanatorium, in some kind of hall, everyone present is in tracksuits). The waters of the pool, illuminated by a deadly violet light, seem to blur reality, leaving only a framework from history – a baton of violence that has become the foundation for everything social, from the team to the family.
Tverdovsky’s films are often criticized for eccentricity and exaltation, for the fact that his cinema is exploitative, stunning the viewer with a cascade of inventive “darkness”. “The Flood” is really a screaming film, it blows up the eyes and drills the membranes (we note the virtuoso work with sound – the voices of the actors here often sound like from a deaf tin well, in the silence of the night some kind of itching, disturbing noise is tossing and turning all the time) . But isn’t crying the only appropriate form of expression today? Haven’t the verbose dramas about the infantilism of creative youth, who for years do not know how to properly emancipate themselves sexually, and still cannot choose between feeling and salary, have not gone down the drain of modern history? Actually, the main thing in Tverdovsky’s interpretation of Zamyatin’s text is the radical destruction of all “feelings” as an apology for violence. It is it that rhymes with tons of chlorinated deadly liquid that bathes the heroes. The fish in it dies – but the man, even dumb from his own cruelty, confidently keeps afloat here.
In theaters April 6th
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
