“Obsessed”: a photo for memory – Vedomosti

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Energetic Liza (Lukerya Ilyashenko, known from the TV series “Ghost” and “Sweet Life”), together with her eternally dissatisfied friend Anna (debutante Anastasia Kuvshinova), rejoicing in life, rushes in a car through the night and rain and almost knocks down a naked woman who has taken on the road a girl with a bewildered face. Lisa brings a stranger to her place, has sex with her (Anna retires with displeasure), and the next morning she is found on the seashore – dead, still naked, but wrapped in foil. On the chest of the victim, a photo image of some house with an unpleasant-looking man in the window is imprinted in an ingenious way.

When director Igor Voloshin does not shoot “folk” comedies (“Fizruk” and “Ambulance” Moscow – Russia “), he experiments with form. Like his debut Nirvana or last year’s Scythe, in Possessed, he diligently works to build his cinematic statement in the most unusual way. Draws a strange world and populates it with strange people. He chooses the wildest angles and considers it necessary to “fill up the horizon” wherever possible. He has here, of course, clip editing, and super-close-ups of the eyes, in the pupils of which sometimes flashbacks or something else is reflected.

It can be seen that the director Voloshin is trying to make it beautiful and unusual, and it is, of course, good that a person is trying. It’s a little worse that he shoots like he’s writing a study assignment for film school students, who then have to find all the tricks, say what they are called (here is a one-point perspective, and here is a Dutch angle), and give them a short definition. In addition, his repertoire of effective techniques is not very large, but he shoots them without hesitation and at breakneck speed. So, when, at about the 30th minute, Voloshin the 30th approximately once fits the frame into the gilded frame of the mirror, or for no reason puts the camera on its side again at an angle of 90 degrees, it starts to enrage a little.

Such an aggressively pretentious form uncompromisingly suppresses the plot, but at the same time does not have its own full-fledged semantics, which would allow, with understandable reservations, to classify The Possessed as a “formalist” and “visionary” movie, and to perceive the director Voloshin, for example, as a Russian Gaspard Noe or Jonathan Glaser.

In Nirvana, the story of love and drugs told there played an auxiliary role and was frankly far-fetched to give the author the opportunity to show the city of Petersburg in a conditionally “cyberpunk” aesthetics. How justified this goal was and how much it was possible to achieve it is debatable, but at least the intention (“why all this?”) Was clear. In “Obsessed” there is no such super-task, and Voloshin works with the genre model of an erotic thriller, so a brazen and, perhaps, offensive question for the author pops up in his head: was it necessary to show off so much?

Genre cinema always involves the active emotional participation of the viewer: he must be funny or scary, he must empathize with the characters, otherwise the genre will not work. In Possessed, the narrative, mechanically composed of the most foppish techniques, draws attention to itself and does not allow you to feel into the story, and its frantic pace leaves no chance for emotional complicity at all.

The ins and outs of the characters are revealed to the viewer, without even having time to properly introduce them into the plot, as they already lie dead and wrapped in foil. And in the most, in theory, critical moments, the viewer is engaged not so much in the emotional work of empathy as in a detached intellectual work to decipher the author’s statement: who is this? where is he from? Why are we now being shown this?

Voloshin tries to build a plot on the motif of duality between the characters (we won’t say which ones, so as not to spoil it), but he fails to portray this motif with proper cinematic means, and therefore he has to explain it in plain text. Explanations generally occupy an important position in the film: at the beginning of the second hour, the story ends unexpectedly and the remaining 20 minutes of screen time explain to the viewer through the mouth of one of the characters what was the matter.

Nevertheless, “Obsessed” for a lot to be commended. Despite the narrative confusion, however, it is not at all boring to watch: the action develops rapidly, and the plot moves here, though stupid, are often discouragingly unexpected. Voloshin does not rely on characters, but on colorful types, and this is good for the picture. Although he suffers defeat with the genre, he is moving along the right path, in general. In his picture there are no boring conversations, any dramatic fussing with the face and long thoughtful plans. But there is a fight in a water tower, a funny drug trip, an investigator with a mechanical, like a Terminator, arm (Oleg Vasilkov, who recently played a difficult investigator in the also formally sophisticated “Identification”) and a sinister killer in a hood and with an ax – for one of his the lanky figure of the picture wants to forgive a lot.

Voloshin seems to be raising some serious issues about childhood trauma and sexual abuse. But the cyborg investigator and the imagery borrowed from exploitative cinema do not fit well with this seriousness, so that the social problem here looks like a sacrifice that the author reluctantly has to make to the gods of modern good taste.

Perhaps the director Voloshin would feel at ease and freest of all if he could completely abandon the need to tell a complex story and filmed, for example, an hour and a half plotless trip inhabited by strange creatures and phenomena. It is from this angle of perception that “Obsessed” looks, although not ideal, but still the most advantageous way.

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