Guests at threshold Pavel’s grandmother, after the death of her husband, lives alone in a cabin near a busy highway and regularly takes truckers at her bedtime. Those who drink can ruin their property and burn their houses inadvertently. Pavla is afraid of fire and fundamentally does not use candles, preferring closed fire in kerosene. And why did these truckers give up? Seeing the illogical behavior of another person, we often ask ourselves a rhetorical question: why does he need it? I wish I could live in peace... Here's the director more than an hour and will answer us this stupid question.
What is the life of an old widow? Alone, without a daughter who moved to the city, without neighbors and without a church nearby? What should be the full life of such a person? First, let’s see the old woman, the director suggests. The personality of Pavla acquires depth primarily due to the slightly repulsive superficiality of other characters. The daughter is sharp and pragmatic, truckers are uncultured, the teenage granddaughter is stupid and dreamy, albeit kind. Perhaps this is just the first erroneous impression of characters who are essentially episodic. But if the task was to show in the same way the fullness of the daughter’s personality, her worries about pregnancy in adulthood, what should her mother show? Out of her mind? Fortunately, this is not the only way to reveal the identity of the grandmother.
Paul is a human being, she cannot live by herself. So she turns on the chicken and the pig. And she continues to be a woman. Do we often see a woman in a single grandmother? Who, even after her husband's death, never stops thinking about him, looking at his picture on the wall. Her husband beat Paula during his lifetime, and now she is limping. But for some reason, she doesn’t hold him mad. Moreover, the husband is a woman in a dream and even the deceased makes himself known by footsteps under the window in the night. At least that’s what a woman thinks, believing that her husband is giving her very specific instructions on how to move forward. Here is traced not only the theme of female loyalty, devotion and obedience, but also a completely unexpected third way to reveal the identity of the main character.
This is through the place where she lives. The village of Porozhki near the highway is a talking name. Truckers decide where to spend the night - "at the grandmother" or in a hotel. But the hotel is already a “settlement” as a common place of residence, and “at the grandmother” means only at the entrance to the settlement, on its doorstep. This is a “narrow” place in which the road, forest, field are interrupted, but the settlement has not yet begun – it happens that there is no electricity, and the lonely old hut itself is a sign not of a settlement, but of something frighteningly distant, about which the director gladly reminds us with folk songs and chapter titles taken from Russian fairy tales. The trucker’s “friend” quite definitely states that she would prefer the cemetery to this strange hut.
The izba is not only the threshold between the inhabited and the uninhabited, but also between life and death. Drivers, and people in general, are not the only ones who come to the hut. The chicken continues to lay eggs, and the deceased spouse is always somewhere nearby. Paul is already close to the threshold of death by age, so this place of life eventually turns out to be, oddly enough, suitable for her, giving her the very full life that is possible under any external state, you just need to find it, this film tells us. But for some reason living people bring Paul on this threshold often only trouble and bitterness, and “from there” comes comfort, retribution, and justice. Have you guessed where the oil magnate sent his gifts from?
6 out of 10
Original