Watch out, spoilers!
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Interested in mentioning the successful role of Yevgeny Tsyganov in the film by Vladimir Mirzoev “How Nadia went for vodka”, decided to watch it. While watching, I did not leave the thought that the plot there for a short film, and shot almost a full meter (78 minutes). In a country house, once quite decent, live two sisters - Nadia and Valya. The older Valya is considered, obviously, smart, although this is not obvious, and the younger Nadia is considered, obviously, beautiful. The older, somewhat hovering in the clouds hostess, who apparently does not work, the younger seems to work (in one place she mentions that she is on Monday to work), but at the same time likes to hang out at parties and firmly succumb there, although the latter and the older does not refuse. And one day after such a party it turns out that Nadia brought to the house of some Alexei, who in the evening finally wakes up. They try to strike up some kind of conversation, not very successfully, after which Nadia goes for vodka, which must be taken from the freezer and disappears, and Valya, meanwhile, still begins a conversation with Alexei, during which it turns out that he is unsuccessfully married, this allegedly “intelligent” man calls his wife a dog, while he himself has been dreaming about some girl who he accidentally saw in the park on a bench, now she is constantly present in his drunken, apparently frequent, fantasies. Valya talks about her ghostly love, which led her to sell her apartment and travel to the city of her dreams, Venice. Valya decides that Alexei "must be saved" and proceeds to the process, Alexei, suspecting it, escapes.
I watched the film late in the evening, so I did not look for information, and today I did it with my usual boring. And I found out some interesting things. It turns out that once the playwright Irina Vaskovskaya wrote a one-act play called “Russian Death”, which the same Mirzoev in 2018 filmed a short film under the same name, which was included in the almanacs “Time of Women”, which ends with an episode of Alexei’s flight and the subsequent conversation of the sisters about Russian death and the end of the world. However, after some time Mirzoev decided to continue the plot and finished the second part, the play did not look for, so I do not know what ends there, but I suspect that as in a short film.
Now for impressions. I agree that here Gypsyganov is somewhat livelier than usual, a little tense, that the hero is again an alcoholic, in general, the topic of alcohol in Russian reality is somehow a lot, I do not know the realities, perhaps it is, especially in the case of characters of a certain age category. Women play well, too. But there are some complaints about the development of the plot, although, of course, one feels that the director tried to tell us something, as it seemed to him, in an original way. Of course, there is satire in the image of the characters, and in their replicas, which is at least mentioned by Alexei as a book that he reads, and which he certainly wants to have, the Gulag Archipelago, in the end we learn that he is like a writer and intends to finish the novel, and before that, apparently sat on the neck of his wife, working in an insurance company. The end is also very unclear - whether Alexei ran away again, and the sisters burn his books at the stake - the gesture itself is ambiguous, it is unclear with what hint, whether something else happened, one can only guess.