True beauty. The fate of any person is unusual, comic and tragic. And all that magic wants, and beauty ...
- More, mate, and warmth and kindness.
In the warm cozy light of many unextinguished candles in an empty art gallery, the old clock struck midnight. And with the last blow of the wall chimes, the paintings came to life. Galante gentlemen and elegant ladies of bygone times began to knead their stiff joints, quietly whisper with dusty voices and cunningly look at their neighbors. And a certain gentleman in a shining campusole from the portrait of the unknown in a dark beret came out of a cramped space limited by a gilded frame, comfortably located at a chic candelabra in a wide chair. Completely oblivious to the faceless caretaker in the corner, he began to recall the past. The story that happened a long time ago to the beautiful daughter of King Gaston the Ninth - Teresa, the same one that had to become a donkey skin.
Hope Kosherova forever entered the history of Soviet cinema as the creator of charming witty fairy tales, loved and appreciated by adults no less than children for the abundance of sparkling jokes and hints of many hidden and not particularly subtexts with an acutely social sarcastic, and sometimes even philosophical meaning. The magical story by skillful manipulation turned into an entertaining parable, leaving the viewer, if not wisely enlightened, then with a bright face and joy in the soul, without fail. Having begun her journey as a narrator from cinema with the film adaptation of Charles Perrault’s most famous fairy tale, Cinderella, retold by E. Schwartz, at the end she returned to a similar plot with Donkey Skin.
Both stories are devoted to eternally pressing issues. And we are not only talking about the banal purely girlish: "How can a bad girl marry a prince?" and the universal human question: "How to become happy?", but a much more serious aesthetic question: "So what is beauty, and why is it deified by people?" Moreover, Kosherova brings the two fairy tales closer together, introducing the image of an evil stepmother into her Donkey Skin, becoming the source and cornerstone of all misfortunes in Teresa’s life. However, if Cinderella was a simple daughter of a forester, quiet, submissive, patient and hardworking, for whom dreams of a palace and balls were from a number of unrealizable, then Donkey skin was already born a princess and at the same time grew up a cheerful, brave and determined smart girl. She voluntarily gives up a luxurious life in order to earn her right to happiness and love through the trials of labor and poverty.
In this magical parable, few miracles are emphasized, and time immemorial now and then echoes our everyday reality. The good sorceress works as an educator and, despite her eternal youth, suffers from heart failure - a disease of the elderly. The evil fairy turns into pigs only selfish hypocrites, and, although offended by the king-father, does not curse his innocent baby, as in Sleeping Beauty, but utters a witty prophetic warning. There is no conditional, but at the same time ideologically flawless division of characters into good and evil. Even the Queen stepmother – this woman “half of the ninth” differs not so much merciless, as caricature funny character. The highway robber is not a terrible dangerous type, but a family man and a touching romantic. A helpless blind old woman with sharp fingers, despite the appearance of the perfect God's dandelion, turns out to be a selfish insidious specialty. Replete with emphasized theatricality and artificial decorative interiors and costumes, so often found at Kosheverova, gave way to real streets, the plausibility of clothes and furnishings, the natural mystery of the forest and the surface of the mirror lake. The footage was filled with sunlight, air, lace shadow of trees, sounded bird chirps, making the picture more alive and real.
Even Soviet translators radically rewrote all the seditious fragments of the Donkey Skin. The French tale was completely stripped of psychoanalytic hints of incest and the Electra complex. Movie history on this issue was created even cleaner. For financial reasons, they are trying to marry the old monarch-oligarch, not their own father. But at the same time, Kosherova most touching way returned the plot to the poetic form as in the original version of Perrault due to the introduction of the narrator-poet into the plot. But most importantly, the film, like the original fairy tale, remained easy to perceive, interesting and at the same time edifying in a good way. True beauty is not an empty graceful amphora. But the hot flame, flickering in a coarse opaque pot, few people are able to see. Although only for such a spiritually sighted beggar can be a beautiful princess. Only those who deserve happiness deserve it.