2023-06-09 00:09:46
Trucker Byrd (Robert Saralp from Slava Polunin’s “Snow Show”) wants to retire as soon as possible, and here it is, just a stone’s throw away. The well-deserved rest house—a huge house, so that the whole village would envy—is almost built. His wife is the beautiful Dina (Svetlana Mamresheva, an actress of the Gogol Center and a participant in the Voice show), very young, not spoiled by the temptations of the big world. It does not give a reason for jealousy, but Bird does not need it. On the flight, all his thoughts are only about how Dina is at home alone. And construction workers around her. Young. Beautiful. Business goes wrong, construction is delayed, the wife suddenly shows character – and Bird starts to get angry. And his wickedness has no end. You can’t tell right away from the plot, but this feminist drama about male arrogance is a free adaptation of a legend from the Nart epic.
Oleg Khamokov is a graduate of the very famous training workshop of Alexander Sokurov in Kabardino-Balkaria, where Kantemir Balagov (“Dylda”), and Kira Kovalenko (“Opening Fists”), and Alexander Zolotukhin (“Russian Boy”), and Vladimir Bitokov came from (“Mom, I’m at home”), and Malika Musaeva (“The cage is looking for a bird”). All are participants and winners of Cannes, Venice, Berlin. Other classmates have already released two full-length films, Bitokov even managed to shoot a series for a video service (“Headshot” for “Kinopoisk”). Khamokov, one of the few students who remained in Nalchik, works in the ensemble “Kabardinka” – made his debut just now.
The reasons are quite prosaic. At first, the director gave several years of his life to another idea – a film adaptation of Amir Makoev’s story “The Dwarf’s Island”, but he failed to bring it to filming. Then “Knots” (a joint production of the “Bereg” studio and Alexander Sokurov’s “An Example of Intonation” foundation) went through a number of iterations – in one version, the action even took place in Germany. But the epidemic prevented, closing the borders. As a result, as it was supposed at once, everything was filmed in Kabardino-Balkaria in the Kabardian language (the film is shown both with Russian subtitles and in Russian voice acting).
Usually a change of citizenship is fatal for a story – it is no coincidence that American remakes, as a rule, are much worse than the original. However, both the plot of “Knots” and the poetics are so universal that, it seems, they would have survived even the German emigration painlessly. After all, this is a parable.
The debuts of Sokurov’s students cannot be confused with each other, the author’s intonation was found on the first try – but there is also a lot in common between them. Perhaps the main similarity is that the allegory is usually drowned in a meticulously reproduced environment, the truth of everyday life, well hidden behind psychological nuances. Khamokov’s “Knots” is another matter. The story of the trucker Byrd could have taken place wherever there are roads and strong patriarchal values. Instead of national color or “lead abominations” of the hinterland – poetically filmed expanses. There is always a strong wind and gentle sun.
Frank parables are often boring to watch. The viewer goes to the cinema to be deceived – to believe in the reality of a fictional world for two hours. And therefore, he is very offended when they don’t even try to cheat him, they immediately confirm: these are not people, these are allegories. As a rule, such characters do not cause empathy, because all their misadventures are purely functional, subject to the final morality. It is easy to guess that in the end the hero of the parable will suffer, and all in order to teach us a lesson.
All these considerations can be repeated in relation to the “Knots”, but with reservations – even if the denouement is predetermined, on the way to the destination, the lines of Dina and Byrd will surprise you more than once with an unobvious turn. For allegories, they turned out to be extremely alive.
Probably the main discovery of the film is Robert Saralp, who had almost never acted in films before. It is impossible to believe that this is the same artist playing both the touching Southern clown in the Polunino show and Byrd, the brutal, bald-headed dork who, from some angles, looks devilishly like Marlon Brando from Apocalypse Now. To match his crazy energy and peppy editing of the film – like in a Hollywood thriller. Sokurov proposed to reduce the timing by 15 minutes – and this operation really benefited the picture.
Byrd’s main tragedy is that he was born a couple of centuries later than he should have been. Somewhere in the Middle Ages, when ferocity was easily converted into titles and castles, he would have been on horseback. Bird is cramped within the law, cramped within the walls of his fortress on 12 acres, which has turned into a monument to his wounded male ego. The house that Byrd built is like a bridge over the River Kwai (from the film of the same name by David Lean). An end in itself, which, as it is achieved, loses any meaning.
In contrast to Bird, who is always like a bare wire, Svetlana Mamresheva’s Dina is as fragile as crystal. The story of her marriage with Bird seems to be a textbook example of an abusive relationship, which is why it is especially impressive how true the script of Zarina Kanukova remained true to the original source – the old Caucasian legend about the beautiful Adiyukh, who languished in the tower in anticipation of her forever absent husband.
Willingly or not, the modernized retelling of the folklore plot organically fit into the global trend of films about strong women. And if it were not for the difficult foreign policy situation, the festival geography of the “Knots” would certainly have been much wider. Now there are not so many lines in their track record – a film screening on Hainan Island (China) and “Spirit of Fire” in Khanty-Mansiysk.
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