2023-09-21 23:03:27
In 1999, Tolyatti investigator Ogurtsov (Ivan Fominov – “Chiki”, “High-rise building”) arrested the criminal gang of crime boss Dasygin, nicknamed Midas (Pavel Priluchny – “Major”, “Devyatayev”) and put its members behind bars for many years. And shortly before this, Midas collected all the gangster gold he had, ordered the craftsmen from AvtoVAZ to make a car out of it and did not tell anyone about it, not even his closest associates.
Time has passed, “our days” have come. The grandson of Midas named Arthur (Roman Evdokimov – “The Librarian”, “Major in Sochi”) is deported from the Netherlands. Arriving in his native Tolyatti, he unexpectedly finds himself at his grandfather’s funeral and sees there three vaguely familiar grandfather’s friends from childhood and one girlfriend. They all look unkindly, they are all obsessively looking for the lost gold, for which they are ready to gnaw each other’s throats. And, what’s even worse, for some reason everyone is convinced that Arthur must know exactly where it is hidden.
By a strange coincidence (which, hopefully, will later turn out to be a well-thought-out plot feint), Ogurtsov is also buried on the same day. The grandson of the deceased – loser Pasha (Eldar Kalimulin – “Epidemic”, “Chimera”) – inherits an old “four”, which had been collecting dust in his grandfather’s garage for many years, and, having scraped the paint on the door, he sees that the car is not simple, but gold. Soon the paths of both grandchildren will cross, and Arthur and Pasha, crazy with fear, will race in antique Zhiguli cars, escaping from the bandits looking for them.
Created by the production company “Sreda” (known for the TV series “Patient Zero”, “Chimera”, “Food Block”, “Permission to Apply”, etc.), the series “Lada Gold” is a multi-character crime comedy about a “big jackpot” with quick editing , several intersecting storylines and dark humor. At first it seems that we are facing another attempt to reproduce “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” using Russian material, but still the director Nikita Vlasov (“Major in Sochi”, “There’s Something Missing in Borenka”) and screenwriter Yegor Chichkanov ( “Yolki”, “Hello again!”) act wiser.
Having barely had time to end, the nineties in Russian culture began to be perceived as a mythological and epic time / Production company “Sreda”
For them, the early Guy Ritchie is not so much an object of enthusiastic imitation as an element of an ironic game in the nineties. In flashbacks stylized to look like old video footage – square screen, bright colors – Ogurtsov wears a funny police mustache and aviator glasses, and Midas sparkles with a gold fixie. With the name and central image of the car, the series transparently refers to “Boomer” and, perhaps, to “Eight” (both films take place in that very year 1999).
Having barely had time to end, the nineties in Russian culture began to be perceived as a kind of mythological-epic time. “Lada Gold” extracts its mythological subtext from the era and plays it out before the viewer in parodic, almost carnival-like images. The story of the creation of the golden “four” is given at the very beginning in the form of a children’s bedtime story. In the second episode, the role of a rhapsodist storyteller is played by a burly security guard (Dmitry Zhuravlev – “Hello again!”) of a garage massif, who tells his friend about the conflict between Ogurtsov and Midas as an epic confrontation between two heroes (the situation is given additional comedy by the fact that he uses his story as a tool of sexual seduction). Golden Zhiguli cars entail a long trail of images, starting from the biblical golden calf and ending with the post-perestroika legend of the party’s missing gold. Well, it is no coincidence that the hero of Priluchny is called Midas – like the king from ancient Greek myths, who knew how to turn everything in the world into gold with one touch. In order to somehow justify the antique nickname of the criminal authority, the authors even had to invent the not very convincing-sounding surname DASygin in addition to the name MIKHAIL.
Actually, the plot is based on the collision of the fairy-tale-mythical past and the everyday present. Midas’ criminal friends – who served their gigantic sentences, emerged from that era straight into the present – are like the risen dead, who would be better off resting in peace, and not running after bandit treasures. “Where is my gold?” – the demonic Grishka (Igor Chernevich – “Territory”, “Offline”) interrogates Arthur with a voice-forming apparatus to his neck, in a sepulchral voice. And he, of course, is horrified by such an unceremonious invasion of fairy tales into reality.
The rest of the bandit citizens look no worse. The melancholy Baldy (Kirill Polukhin – “The Fool”, “Alien”, TV series “Swamps”) teaches criminal wisdom to a group of trainees and is a little upset that no one takes notes on his teachings. Playing the vital bandit Shamray, Daniil Vorobyov (“Breath” and the prequel to “Major Thunder”) effectively reveals himself in the role of a thieves’ jester with the plasticity of a playful male gorilla. The female line is represented by Atamansha Buba (the genre-unexpected appearance of the star of perestroika cinema Marina Zudina – Sveta from “The Fun of the Young” and Masha from the series about Dubrovsky). While she is mostly in the shadows, her assistant, a ninja girl played by Stasya Miloslavskaya (“On the Edge,” “Fire”), is waving her legs on the screen.
The only thing I would like to reproach this cleverly made and intelligent picture is that it somehow turned out that both main characters turn out to be the most uninteresting and least charming characters here. Empathizing with them in their misadventures is not an easy task, but this is still a serious miscalculation for an adventurous comedy with a MacGuffin. It is not clear why we should want the golden car to remain with the unpleasant and boring Pasha, and not go to, say, the colorful Shamray?
However, the finale is still far away (Vedomosti has only seen the first two episodes), which means that Pasha and Arthur have time to open up – if not as epic heroes, then at least as Ivanushka the Fools who evoke condescending sympathy.
#Lada #Gold #visiting #fairy #tale