Wings and bang-bang-bang – Weekend
[ad_1]
“Niche” by Anton Ermolin is being released, the main character of which, named Vyacheslav Tikhonov, unravels the mystery of the death of the USSR in the quaint Yoshkar-Ola. Signs from above, a Soviet passport, dowsing and moths help him in this.
Two touchingly childlike people, like the heroes of Georgy Danelia – Maryam (Elena Nikolaeva) and Vyacheslav (Vladimir Svirsky) – live with dreams that are in no way consistent with their main occupation. She, having fulfilled her duty as an usher at the multiplex, weaves carpets. And he, having delivered the next sofa, takes out the dowsing frames and a pendulum from the case to look for geopathogenic zones and collect negative energy. Meanwhile, the authorities want to send the aspiring sorcerer to Mullah Farid – “he cleared my mind and will clear it for you.” But where would there be without magic in this dull, even Moscow life? After all, Vyacheslav’s official gazelle starts only after a conspiracy: “I am a coil – I roll, I am a spark – I set fire, the husband is a connecting rod, the bride is a shaft, wake up those who were sleeping.”
Vyacheslav decides to turn his hobby into a real job. Friends help you to believe in yourself: pianist-security guard Ippolit (Mikhail Troynik), who believes in a flat Earth and conspiracy theories, his curious acquaintance, who does not wash his pants, but knows how to move from body to body, Jeansman (Aleksey Podolsky), as well as a mysterious assistant in an astrakhan hat – a pie and a suede coat (Sergei Gilev seemed to have been completely transferred into this role from “Patient No. 1” – a film by Rezo Gigineishvili about the death of Comrade Chernenko). He conveys to Vyacheslav an order from those “who control everything” – to buy a suit, and then immediately go to Yoshkar-Ola. This distant city has its own Red Square and people are immediately born with a mustache. Vyacheslav obeys fate.
Anton Ermolin’s debut, produced by Alexei Uchitel, effectively begins with a camera flying through a workshop where various carpets are cleaned – an important part of our everyday life and cultural heritage, by the way. This work organically fits into a number of Russian films, the action of which takes place in the ruins of Soviet myth. Each of them premiered this year in one way or another. This is not only the above-mentioned “Patient No. 1” from where the devil-Gilev jumped out. Three weeks before “Nisha,” Roman Mikhailov’s “October Holiday” was shown in cinemas—in a sense, the twin brother of Ermolin’s film. There, the heroes studied the influence of the Svema film on human consciousness and, looking at the patterns of past eras, tried to understand where the dream ends and reality begins. A little later, Ili Malakhova’s debut “Hello, Mom!” opened in theaters, where the past was reminded of itself with the ringtone song “Cinderella” performed by Lyudmila Senchina: “Believe me, check it, but yesterday I dreamed…” What to add to this? Perhaps only “Frau” by Lyubov Mulmenko, where the main character Vanya falls asleep listening to children’s records from the USSR, and, upon waking up, has breakfast listening to pioneer songs. The sleep paralysis into which Soviet cultural artifacts are immersed, and the painful attempts to wake up from this sleep, is obviously one of the most important themes of the year in our cinema.
“Niche” is also about a dream about something vaguely familiar, about an experience given to us in elusive but vivid, like walking barefoot on a carpet, bodily sensations. About cramps that shake the body at the moment of going to bed or waking up. The Soviet in “Nish” is hardly filled with ideological content. But it requires respect and attention. After all, this is grandmother’s legacy, like VDNKh, or Gorky Park, or the LFZ service in the sideboard.
The main character of the film, flying into the surreal architectural utopia of Yoshkar-Ola, was named by the authors as Vyacheslav Tikhonov not only for fun. He is truly a brave scout, paving secret paths in everyday reality. Everyday life is phantasmagorical (“The Russian Federation is a form of non-existence,” one of the characters says drunkenly), and one can only navigate it by intuition. Relying on Russian chance and his gift, unconfirmed by science, Tikhonov, like a moth, flies towards the light of a vaguely intended goal. The path leads him himself, as happens in fairy tales. Of course, the goal of this path is not the restoration of the Soviet world and myth (“That country may not exist, but there are people,” Gilev’s hero says at some point), but acceptance of oneself in all psychedelic contradictions, metamorphosis.
Tikhonov trusts his subconscious and at some point finds himself on the other side of the screen – inside a cinematic utopia, where you can turn back time and live as if in an eternal sleep, without fear of the alarm bells of reality. This is one way or another the fate of every enthusiastic moviegoer. Here Anton Ermolin’s film finally comes close to Roman Mikhailov’s statement: the frame of the frame is shrinking, here it is – a niche! And the first butterfly of the cinematograph comes out to the public – the serpentine dance Loy Fuller performs by Elisabeth Damsker. Not to say that at this moment the picture becomes clearer, but, thanks for the journey, it was clearly a movement towards the light.
In theaters from November 16
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
