2022-10-20 22:43:00
15-year-old Alisa (Elizaveta Ishchenko, known for the TV series “Pishcheblok”, “The Fool Itself”) has had poor vision since childhood, regularly travels to Moscow for examinations, drinks pills and dietary supplements – in general, under the vigilant control of her mother, she complies with all the prescriptions of the capital’s doctors. But one day the girl learns what her mother tried to hide from her: soon her vision will disappear completely. And Alice decides to have time to “see something beautiful.”
The chosen method is extravagant: she leaves school and enters into a contract with a certain manager. Apparently, the essence of the contract is the promise of sexual contact with the customer as soon as the girl reaches the “age of consent”. In the meantime, the admirer does not approach Alice, she only receives expensive gifts from him and once even allows her to look at herself: he is hidden in the dark, she plays the ukulele in a lighted room – the girl has such a strange hobby.
An article by a psychologist about a teenage girl who will become the prototype of the heroine of the series was found by the producers of the Start video service, shown to the screenwriter and director Natalya Meshchaninova, and she caught fire with the idea. No wonder: the topic of outwardly prosperous, but in fact painfully unhappy families has recently become the main one for her. Moreover, the story about these families is always conducted through teenagers.
Meshchaninova the director was actively talked about after her second film, The Heart of the World, took the main prize at the Kinotavr. But she woke up truly famous after My Mom’s Penguins – this series, released on the Kion platform in 2021, immediately became a resonant one. Still: we have not yet seen such a non-trivial approach to the topic of adoption in our cinema.
Literally before the release of “Alice” Meshchaninova finished work on the film “One Little Night Secret” according to her own script (producer – Sergey Selyanov), and there, too, in the center of the plot is a family with scary skeletons in the closet and a schoolgirl, the same age as Alice, whom these skeletons are Secrets break life.
“Penguins”, “Alice” and “The Secret” involuntarily lined up in a triptych – a story about families, each of which, observing the commandment of Leo Tolstoy, is unhappy in its own way. And although Meshchaninova’s newest series is named after the heroine and she is indeed the main engine of the plot, this is more of a family portrait in the recognizable interiors of middle-class apartments with average incomes.
Alice’s family lives in Tver, there is a loving and beloved, but always sent somewhere zoom-father (Mikhail Trukhin, known for the TV series “Deadly Force”, “Ivanov-Ivanov”, “Treason”), a stress-resistant mother (as always beautiful Anna Mikhalkova, the TV series “An Ordinary Woman”, “Storm”, the films “Playing the Victim”, “Kokoko”) and the older sister (almost the best role of Taisiya Vilkova to date is the film franchise “Gogol”, the films “The Man from Podolsk”, “Doctor Lisa”).
The eldest has everything that, probably, would have been waiting for Alice if she had not been marked by a strange incurable disease: beauty, career problems, beloved son and husband – a jealous moron (in this role – Meshchaninova’s husband and co-author of the script for the series Stepan Devonin, known for films “Big Top Show”, “Heart of the World”, TV series “Peace! Friendship! Gum!”). And this normal life seems to frighten the girl even more than the impending darkness. Alice’s choice – just not like that.
What allows us to attribute the heroine to the popular phenomenon of girl power is her determination to take responsibility for her own life. This determination was not enough for Alice’s older sister, for which she now has to pay. Mom has it in abundance, but there it already turns into a desire for total control over the lives of loved ones and everything around.
Meshchaninova, as usual, is precise, tough and concise in details: here is a classmate who likes Alice and even becomes the hero of an erotic fantasy, shows her some kind of moronic joke on the video. And that’s it: the magic of the sexy girl is completely killed by the lack of intelligence. Here’s a music teacher with pedophile inclinations puts his hands on the girl’s chest, then asks for forgiveness. “Nothing, I need to get used to hiding my disgust,” she replies.
In Alice – Ishchenko, naivety and provocativeness, straightforwardness and secrecy, maximalism and the ability to yield are surprisingly intertwined. To send another photo to a fan, she creates a “non-trivial image”: she sticks on blue eyelashes, paints her eyebrows in an absurd purple color, scatters sparkles over her face – and then she washes herself and becomes strikingly similar to the red-haired girl from Tarkovsky’s film “Mirror”.
Meshchaninova makes passionate films – a rare quality for an art house director. She is able to take the viewer by the throat and not let go until she tells the story to the end. What this ending will be, we, who have seen only the first four episodes and have not read that very article by the psychologist, do not yet know. But for some reason they are sure that Alice, like her namesake from the fairy tale by Lewis Carroll, will definitely find the key to the door she needs and certainly will not drown in a sea of her own tears.
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