"And the whole country looked at the pioneer" Natalia Kudryashova’s film looks very personal. The point is not even that she, being the scriptwriter and director, also plays one of the main roles in the film - actress Oli Krasko suffering from panic attacks. "Pioneers-heroes" - a film primarily designed for the peers of the main characters of the film - generation 30+, or more precisely, 32+. It is this age category, remembering what it means to be Octocts, can, according to the director’s plan, fully feel the pain of the gap between the educational ideals of the Soviet high school and the idealess and empty modernity.
The film is personal and in many ways intimate precisely because age matters. Even in your current 40s, you have some kind of critical view of the Soviet past, and in your 30s or less, you don’t understand the scene of writing milk on paper. And only those who are 30+++, the picture Kudryashova will open to the last frame. At this age, the USSR left you only vaguely pleasant memories of something high and far away - childhood memories, as a rule, are always pleasant. From the sweet mist of childhood memories, exuberant surreal images of the film like police organs take their roots.
It is interesting that almost all the scenes that transport the viewer to the children’s and Soviet phantasmagoria are scenes about the education of citizenship. Catching spies, grandfather-race driver, joining the ranks of pioneers - and in the center of everything are they, pioneer heroes, a living example of the feat for every child. Bizarreness on the verge of the grotesque is for Kudryashova only a path to honesty. One can lie by creating a realistic world of historical paradise or hell on earth in some great or totalitarian country of the last century, but one cannot lie by telling stories of childhood aspirations, fictions and dreams. But is a film based on the education of citizenship in children of the early XXI century possible?
Former octobertas, and today kind of successful mature people - a special context of the film. Attention is attracted by the meaningful speech of children and the empty, often slurred speech of adults. Natalia Kudryashova told in an interview about her generation’s “experience of emptiness”, apparently weathering the meanings, the thirst for which now and then torments another hero of the film. Olga Krasko in search of meaning wanders into the very center of emptiness - to see a psychoanalyst. A certified doctor who does not doubt his professionalism will repeatedly collapse the patient’s personality in a void where there is only her and her “masturbation”, “collapses” and “self-knowledge”. And in the end, he will categorically declare to his ward that it is empty.
The traumatic experience of emptiness, perhaps, serves as the center of the whole film and the worldview crisis that befell Olya, Andrei and Katya. Unsettled personal life, meaninglessness of every action and hard-to-bear loneliness – if you are familiar with such symptoms, then this film will be clearer for you. The paradox of the characters’ situation is that their true self manifested itself only in primary and secondary school age, when they knew what the purpose of their lives was. According to Kudryashova, returning to her pioneering past is the only key that opens up meanings in adulthood. In such a position, something infantile is seen, talking about a very serious trauma, which can only be overcome by a powerful shake, opening the way to its distant past. What the director calls “a metaphysical explosion” and shows on the example of the fates of Andrei and Katya.
Being a fairly slender and thoughtful design, the film about pioneer heroes does not give global recipes for returning to the society of meanings. The problems of a generation with the example of three people remain their individual concerns and do not develop into problems solved at least at the level of a small group of people.
6 out of 10
Original