Woe to Lenin – Newspaper Kommersant No. 202 (7403) of 10/29/2022

Avdotya Smirnova’s film “The Carpenter” was released. After the gambling series Vertinsky, the director changed her tone, turning to a painful drama about a couple who are faced with an incurable disease of their son. Mikhail Trofimenkov the film seemed, despite all the tragedy of the alleged circumstances, speculative and illustrative.

For any viewer who grew up in a Christian civilization, the evangelical associations originally set by Avdotya Smirnova and co-author of the script Maria Stepnova are obvious. If the hero is a carpenter by the name of Osipov (Sergei Umanov), and his wife’s name is Masha (Anna Rytsareva), then who are they if not a modern holy family from the city of Ulyanovsk. God the father is also present, more precisely, God the grandfather – “grandfather Lenin”. Masha’s mother works in his museum-temple, Masha puts notes with prayers for her son’s recovery, as do, say, believers in the miraculous power of Xenia of Petersburg at the St. Petersburg Smolensk cemetery. By and large, the Leninist line is the most original and extravagant thing in Plotnik. And Masha’s solemn passage through Red Square is the most beautiful plan of the film, otherwise avoiding any prettiness.

But the metaphysical dimension of the plot evaporates without a trace, without taking shape, without justifying itself, and gives way to pure sociology. Here lives not only an average, but a simple and prosperous family. The husband is a delicious carpenter: a rare image of joyful labor in our cinema. A young wife can afford not to work. Son – home nickname Hare (Vitaly Olechkin) – they idolize. Your own house, neighbors-kebabs, outfits on the Internet. Masha is interested in Sichuan cuisine, while Osipov prefers chebureks. For her, Lenin is “grandfather”, for him – “blind man’s blind man”. In Moscow, where they bring their son to an appointment with a medical luminary, she rushes to the Mausoleum, but it is more important for him to find a public toilet as soon as possible. But all this is such nonsense.

And when strange bumps appear on the Hare’s head and neck, the family does not collapse, but, clenching its teeth, is looking for any chance of salvation: whether in Moscow, in Germany, for the trip where you have to sell the house. The people around Osipov and Masha turn out to be not that bad: not at all, they are simply spoiled by the housing problem. That the neighbors, that both grandmothers of the Hare. Initially, it is clear that this story cannot end well because it can never. And it is clear that there will come a limit of patience and this, almost ideal, family.

But until this limit is reached, the plot once again – after the transition from metaphysics to sociology – passes into a new “aggregate state”. It was: the epic of everyday walking through the throes – from doctor to doctor, from a bank to a charitable foundation. Became: a painstaking illustration of the five stages of people’s attitude towards inevitable grief, formulated by modern psychology. Yes, not just formulated, but become the property of mass culture. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – these categories now apply even to political and military conflicts.

But the film still cannot be a simple illustration of a popular, even if fair, but inevitably speculative scientific scheme. It was not possible to fill the plot with lively emotions, in addition to those that the doctor ordered. Heroes have a predetermined function—first the function of rejoicing in the modest fullness of life, then the function of suffering—but there are no full-blooded characters.

Against their background, Dr. Shubin, played by Alexei Filimonov, looks much brighter and even more mysterious, as elastic and nervous as in the role of Vertinsky or Chopov’s Lyokha from Alexander Lungin’s Great Poetry (2019). First – a ruthless analyst, who only managed to guess the correct diagnosis, then – a bearer of hope, then – her destroyer. In a word, a real angel of death, whose presence only justifies the metaphysical claim lost by the authors.