2023-05-25 21:56:31
“How beautiful,” the boyfriend admires endlessly. And who can argue with him. Dina (Julia Snigir from The Great, The New Pope and the fifth Die Hard) and the truth seems to be not from here. She would be in the 19th century, a dress with a crinoline and a ball – and she smokes a cigarette in a communal apartment. He works as an editor in a publishing house, lives in the same room with her husband, son, and her parents. There is also an aunt who helps with the housework – she sleeps on a chest. Total six of 20 square meters.
The new 1953 does not promise anything good. The newspapers write about the case of pest doctors and stigmatize cosmopolitans. Everyone is on edge, especially those who are from the “former” nobles, like Dina’s parents. Mom (Irina Rozanova from Stilyagi and Interdevochki) studied at Smolny. Dad (Andrey Smolyakov from “Movement Up” and “Mosgaz”) teaches German philosophy. And Dina is also on her nerves – everything else leaves her husband. She became a little calmer when a young Chekist Ivan (Alexander Kuznetsov from The Heart of Parma and Fantastic Beasts) appeared in her life. “How beautiful,” he constantly says.
There are no more such biographies in our cinema as those of Andrei Smirnov. His “Belorussky Station” (1970) about a bitter meeting of fellow soldiers years after the war is the same necessary attribute on May 9 as the song “Victory Day”. The film was then warmly received by the audience, and at the top – infrequent unanimity. After such success, Smirnov abruptly changed the genre and shot the melodrama Autumn (1974), a sensual, in the spirit of the French new wave. Innocent by today’s standards and defiantly frank in those days.
In the 1980s, Smirnov was one of the leaders in perestroika in the cinema; for two years he even headed the Union of Cinematographers. Since the 1990s, he has been actively and successfully acting in films: “His Wife’s Diary”, “Elena”, “How Vitka Chesnok drove Lekha Shtyr to the nursing home” and dozens of other roles. And in the 2010s, after more than a 30-year break, Smirnov triumphantly returns to directing. “Once upon a time there was a woman” (2011) and “The Frenchman” (2019) received “Nika” as the best film of the year. His new work “For us with you” (from May 26 on Kion, “Kinopoisk” and “Evie”), filmed at 82 (!) years old, is the best of the three.
It is logical to unite the late Smirnov into a trilogy. Even at the level of the plot, the films are similar – private stories against the backdrop of key events in Soviet history (in all cases, Smirnov wrote the script himself). In “Once upon a time…” this is the Tambov peasant uprising (1920-1921), in “Frenchman” – the beginning of the thaw, the birth of samizdat and unofficial art. The heroes of the third film will be hooked on the flywheel of the last Stalinist repressions.
A good historical movie can hardly be easy to watch, but it was the last film, oddly enough, that turned out to be the least harsh and even the brightest of the trilogy. The well-chosen timing of the action (from the autumn of 1952 to the spring of 1953), which creates a kind of anti-Hitchcockian suspense, helps in part. The director of “Psycho” escalated tension due to an imbalance of knowledge – the hero does not yet suspect what kind of misfortune awaits him, and the viewer is already aware and fidgets nervously in anticipation. Smirnov’s suspense, on the other hand, is comforting. Dina hardly dares to hope, and we know for sure that the nightmare will not last long.
Smirnov not only consoles, but also sobers. Movies about distant times are often stylized as the cinema of that period. Hollywood series about the 80s look like a randomly found series from the 1980s – the same Stranger Things. Many Russian films and series without reflection reproduce the aesthetics of socialist realism, which still dictates to us the optics of perceiving the Soviet past – smiling people walk along sunny boulevards to a street orchestra. Smirnov, on the contrary, appeals not to films, but to historical materials, chronicles, memories – such dialogues, such characters cannot be found in socialist realist cinema. And you definitely can’t imagine.
No superfluous frills – neither visual nor dramatic. This is a classic acting movie – even in small roles there are artists of the level of Ksenia Rappoport (“Two Days”), Leonid Yarmolnik (“It’s Hard to Be a God”), Galina Tyunina (“Night Watch”), the recently deceased Albina Tikhanova (“Arrhythmia” ). An amazing study of the material environment – a comparable immersion in the communal life in the cinema on the go and do not remember. The atmosphere and mechanics of queues that arose in any institution or in any store are perfectly reproduced: get up early in the morning, find a person who maintains a list, sign up, then return in the evening – mentally prepared for the fact that the list was lost, and tomorrow everything will be repeated all over again.
Along with a trip back to the past, we are also offered a survival formula that works at any time. The hint is already in the title itself. This is the first phrase of a widely known toast. The full text will have to be omitted due to strong vocabulary, but its meaning is simple: hold on tight to those you love.
#communal #country