2023-11-13 14:06:00
The film “Patient No. 1,” which will not be released in Russia, contains encrypted metaphors about the destructive evil of absolute power and the helplessness of a small person before the state machine.
What is the movie “Patient No. 1” about?
In the gloomy and majestic building of the Kremlin hospital lies a special patient – the Secretary General of the USSR Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko (Alexander Filippenko). Day and night he is surrounded by doctors and KGB officers, and all personnel are subjected to thorough checks before being allowed to see patient number one. The modest nurse Alexandra (Olga Makeeva) does not pass this test, because there is a dark spot in her biography: the girl’s older brother committed suicide while serving in the army. But the Secretary General himself pays attention to Alexandra, and she becomes his personal nurse. From that moment on, her life changes irrevocably: even at dances she is watched by the authorities, at work she is praised by her management and hated by her colleagues, KGB officers force her to “knock”, and her loved one uses Alexandra’s unexpected access to the main man of the country in his murky intrigues.
Still from the filmPhoto: FFC
The Secretary General is very ill, he can hardly speak and breathe, he almost doesn’t walk. Despite the monstrous power concentrated in his hands, he is already just a helpless puppet, deprived of access to information. When he tries to leave the hospital, he is simply driven in circles around the territory in a luxurious motorcade until the exhausted ruler falls asleep. Chernenko’s wife (Inna Churikova) begs to let her husband go: “Let him die at home, the grandchildren are waiting for their grandfather.” But it is impossible to leave the heights of power; it is necessary to create the appearance until the very end that a living corpse is leading the country.
And the tyrant himself is not ready to give up his power. The thirst for power conquers everything: humanity, love for family, and even the fear of death. A terrible scene: lying on his deathbed, the Secretary General stares at his faded eyes and asks in an indistinct whisper how the re-elections went. Having received the answer, he finally grins joyfully with his sunken mouth: “I am needed.”
At the end of the film, the entire hospital staff watches a magnificent funeral procession on television. In documentary footage from the podium of the mausoleum, the successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, makes a speech. The nurses discuss him indifferently: “Young… That means forever.”
Little Man, Afghan and “Ku!”
Director Rezo GigineishviliPhoto: Sergei Karpukhin/TASS/dpa/picture alliance
The metaphorical nature of Gigineishvili’s statement is crystal clear. Absolute power destroys, makes a slave, irrevocably cripples the soul of its bearer and turns society into an ugly and unviable system built on violence. This power is not given up voluntarily. “The structure of Soviet power, which we still mentally experience to this day, changes forms, but its essence remains the same – it does not allow freedom,” the director said, presenting his film at the Cottbus festival.
At the same time, Gigineishvili has endless compassion for people. We even see the all-powerful General Secretary through the eyes of a quiet nurse: his bashful weakness, pale bare legs with age spots, weak arms bruised from the IV. The horror of the little man’s helplessness before the inevitability of the evil of absolute tyranny is conveyed in the scenes of Alexandra’s interrogation, as well as in the brilliantly artistic scene of the suicide of the stealing general. A man with a bloody face is desperately running through the fresh snow, the stern walls of a government building looming gloomily over him. Compared to the monumental, wordless colossus, man is hopelessly, infinitely small and insignificant. People in civilian clothes catch up with him, and his only way out is a shot in the head.
It’s hard to believe that the film was conceived and shot before the start of the war in Ukraine – the film contains so many hints and forebodings. A small woman, a department nurse, washing the floors in the leader’s ward, calls out to Chernenko for help. Her son is in Afghanistan, there has been no news from him for a long time. With desperate directness, she says to the Secretary General: “And you return them all, you can, who won’t give it to you?” “America,” Chernenko instructively voices the eternal horror story of the Russian government.
One of the important lines of the film is connected with the film by Georgy Danelia “Kin-dza-dza!” Under Chernenko, it was banned from showing and was released only after his death. In one of the episodes, Chernenko watches the newly filmed “Kin-dza-dza!” in the hospital cinema. The laughing and satisfied general secretary is interrupted by the KGB officer: “KU is about you, Konstantin Ustinovich.” The leader of the country immediately stops laughing: “Tell them not to let him out!” However – and here the director leaves some hope for the audience – in the last frames of the film, the main character is still sitting at the screening in the cinema and laughing to the hopelessly false sounds of the famous “Mom, Mom, what will I do?”
“The Death of Louis XIV”
The film “Patient No. 1” was filmed in Moscow in February 2022. According to the director, the work was carried out in economy mode, there was not enough money, the group had to do it within 17 shooting days. On the very last day of filming, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
The concept of the film was influenced by several factors: Covid isolation, deaths due to the pandemic, and the decline of the director’s father. The director names Chekhov and Albert Serra’s film “The Death of Louis XIV” as references for the film. “I took care of my father – these were his last days in the hospital. Memories of this stuck in my head. These fears and these details did not give me peace. During Covid, I read a lot, sitting at home. I came across the book “The Death of Ivan Ilyich “- about a man who is going through the last days of his life. And he, too, like the main character of my film, was a civil servant,” said Rezo Gigineishvili at the presentation of his film in Cottbus.
Still from the filmPhoto: FFC
On October 6, even before the world premiere of the film, Rezo Gigineishvili received a prize in Munich Werner Herzog Stiftung. “For me, this is a picture of a new form, a new artistic thinking,” noted the classic of European cinema Werner Herzog, presenting the award.
Rezo Gigineishvili made his directorial debut, the youth comedy melodrama “Heat”, in 2006. Later, his comedies “Love with an Accent” (2012), “Without Borders” (2015), and the TV series “The Last of the Magikians” (2013-2015) became especially popular. In 2017, the director moved away from entertainment films and turned to the serious genre, making the film “Hostages,” based on real events – the hijacking of an airplane in 1983 in Georgia.
The director does not plan to show his film “Patient No. 1” in Russia.
FilmFestival Cottbus – more about the festival in Cottbus
On November 11, Rezo Gigineishvili received the prize for Best Director in Cottbus. And the best film of the festival was the film “Forever and Forever” by Ukrainian director Anna Buryachkova, shot with the participation of Dutch film producers. The film tells the story of growing up and teenage love in the post-Soviet 1990s in Kyiv. Georgian Eka Chavleishvili was recognized as the best actress at the festival. She was awarded the prize for her role in the German-Swiss film “Blackbird, Blackbird – Blackberry” – a romantic love story during a midlife crisis in a Georgian village. The film is based on the popular novel by Tamta Melashvili and has already won several major international awards.
Film Festival Cottbus is one of the leading international festivals of Eastern European film, founded in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 12 films from 19 countries competed in the 2023 competition.
#Gigineishvilis #film #dying #secretary #general #won #Germany