Music and Civil War Formal signs - hystern about the Civil War. Pursuing foreign businessmen who want to take out of the country a valuable collection of old bowed instruments Guarneri, the Chekist in the company of a quartet of musicians involved as experts, makes a trip from Moscow to Odessa in a converted freight car. The country still has troubles, unfinished gangs, so there will be a chase with a shootout, and secret agents, and the unpretentious life of the Civil War era. At first glance, the film has little to do with historical reality. The hairstyles of the heroes are laid in the fashion of the 70s, everyone is dressed with a needle, and the elegance and taste with which the clothes of the heroine of actress Tatiana Ivanova (ChK agent Anna Sushko) can be envied by any modern model with a fashion show. The work of the costume designer, production artists, the operator is canceled, the film is beautifully shot. All right, a fantasy film about the Civil War.
If you look at 'Guarnery Quartet' from a different angle, then we have a cultural detective. Let’s divert from ideological biases (who are for the red, who are for the white). The film formulates a clear and relevant system of values for our days. Music and culture are the highest values, even during the Civil War. The intelligentsia, honestly doing their job, serves the country and the people. Music, meaningful sound form the soul of any person, and no amount of money, ideologies, wars and social cataclysms can change this fact. It seems to me that in the Western cinema of the 70s there were only separate approaches to such cultural issues. Oddly enough, the closest analogue (filmed in a completely different aesthetic, with different artistic merits and on a different material), which is remembered offhand is (don’t be surprised) a French film 'All the mornings of the world'.
Well-chosen music series. Musicians from the Guarneri Quartet & #39; perform Italian baroque music of the XVIII century, and in the music of the old masters find a spiritual tension that reflects the era of revolutionary change. Characteristically, people-fragments of the Russian Empire are shown in the film with sympathy. Collector Butorin (played by Vaclav Dvorzhetsky) disinterestedly transfers his collection to foreigners, hoping to save it from death in Soviet Russia. A retired tsarist general in Odessa gives his collection of ancient instruments to a musician from the Bolshoi Theatre, seeing that music in Russia has not died and is in demand.
Mood movie, with ' second bottom '. You can see it as just another naive Soviet Eastern detective, but you can see it as a film about music and musicians - a binding element of the culture of any society.