A movie that needs to be shown and watched! I don’t think it will be easy to write about this movie!
I would like to point out that I disagree with the statement that the movie is “documentary”. Still, it is staged, although it is ideally suited to the “document”.
The film, in fact, without a special plot. We are introduced to the village and its inhabitants. I deliberately put it in my own name because the village itself has no name in the film. More precisely, it is, but we are not informed. From the credits we learn that the film was shot in the village of Verkola, Arkhangelsk Region. However, this does not matter, since the plot should not have any geographical reference. This happened in those (90s) years all over the country, I suppose.
I watched the film very hard and painfully. Although it is sinful for me, a resident of the West Siberian region of Russia, to complain – many villages in our region have not drowned in “drinking poverty”, although, of course, there are very, very few collective farms.
And still about the movie. The director (she is also a screenwriter) shares with us his anxiety about the extinction of the countryside and, I think, is trying to figure it out with us. We are shown how everything in the village is done in a hundred gram. Fixed the stove, the hundredth. In the barn of the pigs knocked a fence - get a glass. And the truth is that I was convinced of this when I visited the village many times, where single women always kept a bottle or two in the refrigerator at the expense of "payment" for some service.
The main characters (I don’t know which of them has the role of the “first plan”, and who is “secondary”) I see Nikolai Skuridin – a quiet good-natured man working as a cattleman, suffering from an ulcer, who was planning a trip from the dispensaries, shamelessly recalled “from above” and Chapurin – the chairman of the village council. A brave man who is trying to save the village. Worried about local men drinking. Trying in the fight against this “contagion” the most radical methods: like the creation of a poster about the “queue to the next world”. I found his speeches, quite frankly, a bit pretentious about the country’s mess. The filmmakers overreacted to this. And since the film is presented to us as a “document,” his constant lamentation that “the country is a mess and there is no money” looks even more unnatural. Of course, they are fair.
The film is not about “rural alcoholism.” It is rather about what the country has been brought to, having destroyed practically the entire peasantry by bastard reforms. We're just showing you a piece of life in a simple provincial village in the form of (damn, I'll have to use that word again) a "document." It starts with nothing and ends with nothing. The film could last four hours, three, maybe a little less than one and a half, which is what we see.
I found the final scene to be very painful. When we are shown Nicholas and Konstantin - a huge ambal, who came out of prison and settled with a local girl, with whom he corresponded for several years. He doesn't want to help or work. Moreover, he threatens Chapurin to burn down his house if he makes it work. And in the very last scene, Skuridin teaches Constantine to make a “bird of happiness” out of wood.
Did she bring you much happiness?
With a smile and tears in his eyes Nikolai answers.
I have not seen a stronger scene in the national cinema for a long time.
The film was shot entirely in a real village. No decorations whatsoever. And if you want to see a real village - not the one that we are shown recreated on Mosfilm by artists who did not go beyond the Moscow Ring Road, but a real one - then you should watch this movie. Draw your conclusions, understand and analyze. The film is quite heavy, but truly humane, created not for festivals, where it is now very fashionable to show the “alcoholic outback”, but for those who care about what happened (and now continues) in the regions and remote districts. In no case is it a black man.
And I was very upset that the jury in Berlin appreciated the work of Lydia Bobrova, awarding her the “Peace Film Award” – the so-called “humanism in cinema”. But critics in her native Russia did not even honor her national prize “Nika”, giving the main prize to the film “The Thief” Chukhray Jr. Not bad, but still much less significant in the lives of people film.
9 out of 10
P.S. Not in the negative – apparently due to a complete lack of budget, but the film was shot on a very, very bad film. The film is dated 1997, but it was shot clearly still on the Soviet “Svema” with absolutely disgusting colors, from the early 80s. Probably not in my lifetime to see this film with a good image and restored colors ... about the same way I hope to see Muratova’s Asthenic Syndrome.