Let’s start with classification. In the filmography of Alexei Uchitel, it is logical to place the psychological drama “Tsoi” in the wrong segment that is associated with the Leningrad rock club (small fragments from the films “Rock” and “The Last Hero”, filmed about 30 years ago, are also used in the new picture) . “Tsoi” fits much more organically into the niche of “historical fiction”, where the recent “Matilda” is imposingly located, interpreting the relationship between Emperor Nicholas II and the ballerina Kshesinskaya in a peculiar way.
With “Matilda” “Tsoi” has in common not so much an artificially created atmosphere of scandalousness, but a methodological similarity. The teacher again acts here as an interpreter of historical facts. He proceeds from the fact that there are things that cannot be verified – no, even the most corrosive biographer can say with absolute certainty what exactly the people who were left alone were talking about. This can only be assumed that any author has the right to do. In “Tsoi” is about the same as in “Matilda”, the ratio of more or less reliable facts and the director’s imagination, which helps the author to solve his personal conceptual problems. They have a very indirect relation to the main character, who sleeps peacefully at the Theological Cemetery and is unlikely to turn in his grave from the new film about himself, completely harmless in relation to his personality (Choi could nervously roll over from Kirill Serebrennikov’s film “Summer”, where there is a priori doomed, albeit a bold attempt by Tsoi to play). However, it cannot be ruled out that there is no Tsoi in the coffin – the version “Tsoi is alive!” nobody canceled. This mantra, as if by chance, sounds at the end of the picture from the lips of the eerie impersonator Tsoi, frightening at the same time by external similarity and internal dissimilarity. Not far from the Liteiny Bridge, he asks for a light from the main character of the picture, which is not Viktor Tsoi at all.
One can imagine how happy his ingenuity was for the one who came up with such an infernal idea: the driver of the Ikarus (Evgeny Tsyganov), in a collision with whom Tsoi died, is driving a “pazik” with the mystical number 21-15 (date of birth – date death), carrying the coffin with the body of the singer and his loved ones from Latvia to Leningrad, who were not recovered from the shock. From the point of view of plausibility, it is quite possible to explain such a coincidence: well, there were no free drivers in the entire district. “Tukums is a small city,” remarks the cunning producer Tsoi (Igor Vernik), who instantly reads the devilish irony of fate and calculates what kind of driver he is, on one intuition, which in show business figures really sometimes resembles a psychic gift.
It is in this vein – not realistic, but metaphysical – that it is best to perceive Tsoi. This is by no means a biographical film in the “exhumation” genre, when, after the death of the hero, relatives shed light on an ambiguous personality. There is none of that here. Rather, we have before us an esoteric study of the influence on others of the astral body of Tsoi, which continues after death. “Tsoi” can be defined as “a strange tale with an unhappy ending” and the necessary magical rituals. By the way, I remember how 30 years ago the Teacher included in the film dedicated to the memory of the rocker, the passage of a truck, in the back of which there was a black obelisk on his grave.
The most real character in this fictional story is Viktor Tsoi himself, who is practically absent in the film, except for a few archival videos. His songs are not that abundantly heard from the screen, but are mentioned a couple of times in the dialogues. Indeed, sitting at the window of the bus, it’s hard not to remember the “Trolleybus that goes east.” However, Tsoi’s entire entourage was carefully renamed for the sake of legal security and because of the claims of Tsoi’s son Alexander (which, however, still did not prevent him from filing a lawsuit with the Presnensky Court of Moscow for violation of the rights to the image against the Uchitel’s film studio and Tsoi distributors). Not Maryana, but Marina, not Natasha, but Polina. Alexander himself is also not Sasha, but Zhenya, and the producer Yura is not Aizenshpis, but Raizen. In such an atmosphere of the strictest secrecy, this masquerade funeral cortege sets off, although in terms of atmosphere and interactions between characters it resembles anything but a mournful funeral procession. “This is not a gloomy picture of a coffin being transported,” Master said shortly before the film’s release. “This is a picture of how Tsoi, even from there, influences us all and we become better.”
It is difficult to say which of the characters undergoes a transformation for the better along the way. The most disgusting of all – the producer – is only getting worse. He is sincerely concerned only with the loss of the cassette with Tsoi’s unfinished album “47”, suspects the driver of her theft and arranges a hellish race on his Mercedes, endangering the already demoralized bus passengers. Two women (Maryana Spivak and Paulina Andreeva) are trying to calm down the producer, whose attitude towards the deceased is explained in an unceremonious dialogue with one of the officials: “Are you a widow?” “All the widows are here.” The eldest widow is accompanied by a new companion (Ilya Del), who constantly kisses the bottle and throws himself at the coffin in a white-hot hysteria: “Get up, Vitya, get up!” After that, the driver is forced to take the bottle away from him, but only for the inconsolable mourner to take a new one out of the bag and begin to dig into his girlfriend: “Do you want to disperse, I’ll let you go back to Vitka?” On board there is also a photographer girl (Nadezhda Kaleganova), who was going with Tsoi on his last fishing trip and was supposed to be in the car with him at the time of the disaster (there is even an almost detective hint that it was she who could ruin the brakes in Moskvich) ). Even before boarding the enraged bus, she tries to drown herself (a wave of suicides of fans who wanted to follow their idol to the next world is, by the way, a historical fact), but the same driver still manages to get her from the seabed.
The photographer owns one of the few memories in the film about Tsoi, who once came up with the advice: “When you eat ice cream, you need to look through your eyelids at the sun.” So it is important to look at the Teacher’s film through the correct prism. Everything falls into place and the feeling of absurdity is smoothed out if you try to abstract from the personality of Viktor Tsoi and consider this story as a mythological plot, where the driver, striking in his balance, is Charon, transporting the soul of the deceased through the Styx. There would be no dramaturgy in this routine ritual if several demons had not crowded into the funeral boat (in the sense of the bus), who quarrel, scream, grimace, tempt and provoke Charon, trying to piss him off, to which the otherworldly boatman reacts with heroic equanimity, remaining from beginning to end the only sympathetic character.
The director himself persistently uses the genre definition “parable” in relation to “Tsoi”. And in a parable, a moralizing conclusion is usually supposed. What lessons can be learned from the film? Perhaps this: if you are not indifferent to who will see you off on your last journey and how it will all look like, you need to be more careful in your relationships during your lifetime and carefully filter your social circle. However, Viktor Tsoi himself, the author of the ironic song about futile self-preservation efforts “Be careful, take care of yourself,” would probably only laugh at such foresight.
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