Three stories is a film that can be called one of the most significant in the Russian cinema of the 90s. Such a special atmosphere of the streets and heroes, emphasized by the scenery and situations taking place on the screen. There are no definitions of cities, no names of streets, but there is an entourage corresponding to time. I love the slowness of storytelling with which stories happen. The stories are summery, heavy with heat and heat, and you sink into them like a midday nap. The flowercore remains soft, warm almost the entire film, as if emphasizing this.
What can motivate a person to kill? What needs to happen for this thought to be put into action? The heroes of each story are not alike. They have very different motives, they have very different lives. A little girl, a nurse, a tired employee – they have only one thing in common: they all decided to kill. And the murder is so simple, as if it cost them no effort at all.
The dialogues in the film emphasize a certain absurdity of situations and melodiously reason in the course of the narrative. So you can think with a tired head in the evening, when thoughts are gradual, and the body is calm.
The cast also emphasizes the time. Refined Litvinova, sharp Okhlobystin, nervous Makovetsky and sedate Tabakov - look organically in this tragedy. I don’t want to choose one of my favorite novels. It is the combination of three stories that allows you to feel all the questions that the film asks.
The film was made for an outside observer. How the characters are shown to us and what they do is not revealed to the viewer until the end. You can understand them only by their actions and words.
For me, this film will remain in the list of films of the 90s that you need to watch to understand the mood of that cinema in Russia.
7 out of 10
“Three Stories” is one of the most famous films of late Muratova, as well as “The Adjuster”, fanned by many years of sinophile love, many viewers judge the artistic world of the director by this picture: it was “Three Stories” that made Muratova in the eyes of the public a complete misanthrope. This is certainly postmodern cinema with its immoralism and relativity of moral characteristics. The apocalypse predicted in Asthenic Syndrome has arrived, but Muratova is too cheerful an artist to regret it.
The mosaic structure of many of her paintings, the stringing of self-valued episodes in their color onto the flabby thread of a single narrative in her late work frankly gives way to the form of an almanac. However, the novels that make up the "Three Stories" are connected by a common theme and unity of intonation, sustained in tones of "black humor" and existential absurdity. Sometimes, when viewing this tape, you get the feeling that it was shot for Litvinova and her plot, the other two novels are added for the full meter. Of course, Ophelia sets the interpretation of the entire tape psychoanalytic coordinates, the general tone of reading, but this is not the best part in the Three Stories.
The most complete, conceptually holistic, filled with vital color, causing the viewer a whole range of contradictory emotions, was the final film of the novel “Girl and Death”, where Tabakov and the little performer in a brilliant duet outplayed both Litvinova and Makovetsky, and a whole crowd of episodic performers, as always Muratova, mostly unprofessional. How do you interpret the Three Stories? It is thought of as a psychoanalytic parable of the social psychosis that afflicted culture after the death of the Father.
Countercultural trends, the twilight of Puritan morality, anti-patriarchal and anti-masculine intellectual strategies that changed the face of Western culture for thirty years (from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s) became mainstream in Russia of the 90s: neurotic women emancipated from male prohibitions, seeking themselves in acts of transgression, a social field bursting with total irony and carnivalization of hierarchies, the legitimation of the marginal and deviant – all this made the 1990s the era of the “new barbarism” not only in Russia, but also in the world.
The collapse of idols and stereotypes, the decline of the era of metanarratives, the re-mapping of old plots, the invasion of the natural and biological into the symbolic and cultural, direct satisfaction of desires, now unmediated by prohibitions and imagination - all that Muratova literally shouted about in Asthenic syndrome, in Three Stories became a given, a new context. The world described by the director in this film is primitive and uncultured, here they are killed, have group sex, and the former hierarchies are simply abolished.
Muratova is far-sighted enough not to moralize, reproach or reproach, she just laughs this hellish carnival on the ruins of the Names of the Father (Law, Society, State, Culture, Art). This is not good, not bad, Muratova believes, but one must somehow learn to live in a world in which everything from animal life to childlike perception is poisoned by cruelty. Of course, a film like “Three Stories” could be made only after the kitsch cinematic revolution that Tarantino made in “Pulp Fiction”, setting the vector for the development of the genre of cynical and bloody comedies with criminal content.
Muratova took this revolution into account: murder in her universe, starting with the Three Stories, becomes a way of self-realization of mentally flawed characters – puppets in her hands. The bloody guignole "Three Stories" is a kind of intellectual game launched by a postmodernist on the ruins of the Tradition he blew up. It is impossible to judge the people-killers from the Three Stories by the standards of the cultural world, because culture in the proper sense is no longer here, there is a cultural space where biological laws, the laws of the animal world operate, where the cat torments the bird (this vivid episode in the third novel is largely the key to the film as a whole), that is, the laws of natural selection, and therefore the strongest wins.
In this warped world, Ophelia looks in the mirror, but sees not herself, but her mother (that it is if not a failure of self-identification, the inability to pass the “stage of the mirror”, according to Lacan), here the disabled grandfather teaches outdated laws, and he is not only not listened to, but in general cynically annihilated, here the boiler room looks like a branch of hell, in which even the intellectual no longer repents of what he did, infernally shouting at the corpse - all these, according to Muratova, symptoms of an established, developed social psychosis, which has seized the whole world).
Muratova does not criticize social systems in Three Stories: they have always been the same for her, for humanity is always the same. Do people kill because they are evil in the first place? This happens on a large scale, Muratova believes, when the mechanisms of restraint of human freedom, the avalanche of evil that cannot be stopped, disappear. Another is dangerous when the symbolic order as such collapses, not when one sign matrix replaces another, although this is fraught with violence, but when symbols die off in principle, it is not terrible when some gods succeed others, and when there are no gods in principle.
The Three Stories is about the psychotic murder of the Father and the whole system of ontological, aesthetic and ethical hierarchies that He held together, a death predicted by Nietzsche and explained by Freud in Totem and Taboo on the example of ancient societies. Biological annihilation is the triumph of the animal in man, the death of a cultural, symbolic being in him. Since the time of Kant, and then in Heidegger and Cassirer, a priori forms, symbols (no matter the existential or social order) were considered an important link mediating the perception of a person, making him meaningful and articulated. Now they are not, and the knowledge of man, both external and internal world has become clip, the world itself has turned into color spots, which short-sighted human existence is no longer able to turn into contours and silhouettes.
On this occasion, one can be horrified or simply, like Muratova in Three Stories, laugh at humanity, which has lost its own human content in an unequal battle with its emancipated instincts, which made it an idiotic animal, finally achieving happiness in the direct realization of its most destructive desires.
Kira Muratova’s films are a separate universe. Here they speak in a special language, smile grotesquely and are not afraid of high words. There is a place for slightly crazy, overflowing with the joy of life, elderly lovers, cringing in the entrance, stupefying mothers, staggering around in landfills, all kinds of old people and old women, as well as for ordinary little people speaking in the manner of Dostoevsky's heroes.
Speaking of Dostoevsky. Here it can be found not only in the style of speech of the heroes (constant nervous repetitions of the same words and phrases, self-deprecation, ingratiation), but also that border state between good and evil, humility and rebellion, without which it is so difficult to imagine the works of the classic.
Oh, that poetry! And those songs! They always cheer me up so much and discharge the atmosphere so hot that I just laugh, and then I think why would it be. It's a very good director's trick.
“Three stories” are made in this poetics, not without the charming heroine Renata Litvinova “not of this world”. By the way, it is in this film that the phrase “I would put zero on this planet” is pronounced and the reasons are directly explained (no super-intertextual hints).
In principle, this film can be watched and not only for fans of art house, although it is of course somewhere in that plane, but often the most difficult to watch "art" movies because of the lack of plot, here it is at least poured.
What could be worse than a bad movie? Just a bad movie that you expect a lot from. So, after flipping through the reviews and trusting people whose views on cinema coincide with mine, I prepared in absentia to express delight in Kira Muratova’s film Three Stories. But after fifteen minutes, I began to state that I do not observe enthusiasm in myself, and moreover, everything that happens on the screen irritates me.
With the work of Kira Muratova, I am familiar very superficially, and to be more precise, I saw the Adjuster and Asthenic Syndrome. The first did not make any impression, as if it did not exist at all, but the second coped with its task of psychological pressure on the viewer and left the desire to get acquainted with the work of the director further.
So, what do we have? And we have a bunch of surreal scenes that have absolutely no meaning. That is, the sense, if you try, can be found in the garbage can, but is it really there and should you look for it? The film is somewhat similar in atmosphere to “Happy Days” by Balabanov, but in the first case there was an idea in the picture that justified the surrealism and absurdity created on the screen, and here it is just a form without content. I already hear the cries of connoisseurs who offer to watch the Christmas tree and remove their hands from the author’s kin, which is not available to everyone, which opens the viewer’s eyes and shows the hopeless cruelty and dirt of this absurd sick world, and I ask them to apologize for offending tender feelings. All this did not cause me any emotions, except boredom and irritation, because it was absolutely out of place!
The plot of each of the three, in no way related to each other, does not make sense to retell so as not to release a spoiler. If you briefly run through each, the first seemed especially meaningless, filled with grotesque absurd characters, gays and other charms of arthouse. The second has a more interesting plot, but still horribly banal, and if the same were to be told in a more “human” form, without betting on the absurdity of being, he would only win. I liked the third one the most. It was a small ray of light in this realm of author cinema. Compared to the rest, the novel turned out to be whole and logical in its own way. The cruelty of a little girl doing unchildish things looked convincing and evoked emotions. In some places I wanted to strangle this little crap, which is a plus for the film, but the long scene with the evisceration of a chicken brought only the already familiar fit of disgust, a bewildered shrug and a rhetorical question: “Where should I understandably shake my head?” "
Perhaps after some time, I will reconsider my opinion, imbue with the picture and express belated delights. I'm not being ironic because it happened. But for now
Do you want me to kill the neighbors that interfere with sleep?
Something you don't like - just eliminate it as an impending problem. The heroes of the three stories share, at first glance, innocence and helplessness. Each of them initially behaves peacefully. Someone complains, asking for advice from a friend whose high-flown speeches lead to confidence in the rightness of the hero. Someone behaves like a person who believes that he wants to help and “helps”. And someone just tired of someone else’s imposed society with prohibitions and eternal “You can’t, can’t, can’t.”
In general, the film is characterized by imagery, clear spelling of characters, symbolism and associativity. It is impossible not to recognize the handwriting of Muratova, later carefully borrowed and processed in a different style Litvinova. From the first minutes of viewing, the viewer plunges into some strange atmosphere of the madhouse, for which he is fascinated by watching, unable to look away. It is a carnival of stupidity, behind every phrase and action of which lies a subtext. The film generates strong emotions and some not quite conscious horror on an instinctive level. The picture is strong because it has an elusive charm and is perceived at the level of the wordless. Each episode is a short film with an open ending, after which you can think and think. The film hooked me personally, because I really want to think after watching.
"Boiler N6"
But what if it's some bad herb, you have to root it out as soon as you know it. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery "The Little Prince")
The atmosphere of a dark enclosed space, a dirty hell under the ground, in which a fire burns day and night, kindled by those who are not worthy to be outside. The choice of the place of action is more than justified and logical, there is a certain connection with the “Chamber N6” by A. P. Chekhov. With the promotion of the picture, horror is whipped up, people do not listen to each other and throw themselves in vain with words with which they do not know what to do in the future, for neither words can be taken away nor actions can be canceled. The schismatics of the modern world are not terrible by murder, but by “ignorance” and unwillingness to realize what they have done in an attempt to get rid of it and forget it. And the horror of modern society is precisely in the unwillingness to see their guilt and repentance for it, hence such a “hero” of our time.
Ophelia
My child, Ophelia, sister!
When the fathers die, they die.
Madness kills the daughters. (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet)
The most beautiful of the parts with its symbolism turned inside out. Muratova takes as a basis the well-known Ophelia of Shakespeare, a young girl who committed suicide, not wanting to put up with the cruelty of the world, and embodies the book beauty in her real opposite. Immaculate, pure in soul and body, the beautiful Ophelia today is not the same as the romantic Shakespeare, and therefore her death evokes a reverent silence not by its purity, but by sorrow and the thought “How far have you come, wretched?” Thanks to the incomparable Litvinova, the actions of her vicious heroine look not like something terrible, but like a caricature fairy tale from which you can not take your eyes off. By the way, I want to pay special attention to the moment with two old women who do not hear each other, he really stuck in my soul, with such warm sad helplessness they shout at each other.
"Girl and Death"
“Someone is dead,” thought the girl, because her recently deceased old grandmother, who loved her all over the world, repeatedly told her: “When the star falls, someone’s soul flies to God.” (H. K. Andersen, The Matches Girl)
The first association that arose after reading the title of the third novel is Andersen's fairy tale about a poor girl who just wanted to warm up. Another story, if you take it as a basis, looks like an inside out plot, initially long showing its insides in the teeth of a black cat. Such a beginning definitely does not indicate anything pleasant in the future, but the finale is simply amazing. It suggests a parallel with Anderson’s heroine Muratovskaya. The opposition and community of a girl who just wanted to warm up and a girl who just wanted to play outside. No unnecessary words, actions, everything in business, strong and scary. Here a special place is occupied by the monologue of the main character about old age, creepy in its rightness.
I would especially like to highlight the technique of repeating phrases, with which each phrase sounds more clearly in the brain, drawing new associations and imprinting on the mind. + for music, or rather, for the most part, for its absence. At the beginning, the oppressive silence prepares the viewer for unfunny events, at the end gives time to think on the credits and realize everything he saw. Thus, we see a disappointing reality in Muratova’s brilliant presentation: what neighbors, husbands, friends, parents and children, old people and grandchildren are in modern society. A stunning hyperbolized brutal reality.
Provocation. Pungent as acid, explosive as a grenade, merciless as a fighter in attack. Fearless as a condemned to death, desperate as a Palestinian terrorist, sobering like a point-blank gun. Breaking into consciousness, like the roar of a daily in a minute of ascent, and tormenting like the appendix of conscience. It is diverse and can capture any sense. It appears in the form of fascinating images and paintings, but can also be an impersonal hint, even a simple nod. She is talkative and even talkative, but she is able to strike with contemptuous silence. It is as indestructible as war and death. It is itself a casus belli. And, of course, she is always aggressive.
And how else to pull the viewer and the reader out of the cave of comfortable stamps and cozy prejudices, from which he, lazy, of good will, will never crawl out into the light of God? How do you make him perceive reality in its own right, unfiltered by a thick layer of familiar worldviews? Only so: shockingly introducing it into a stupor and disabling the protective mechanisms of consciousness, provocatively blowing up the brain and spraying the scum of previous knowledge about the world order. And Kira Muratova, the daughter of an underground communist and a rigid nonconformist in art, learned this truth very well. She never spares her viewer, forcing him to watch only what she sees, director Muratova.
What did you see in Russia in the 1990s? A power preoccupied only with snatching everything that is possible and impossible, but very much wants, and people preoccupied with survival outside and in spite of it. And death. Many, many deaths: from the everyday shooting of a businessman returning home after a walk with a dog, to the frozen homeless person shown in the news; from a child who died in a hospital of AIDS, to old people dying of hunger in complete poverty and loneliness. Death has not only occupied a great place in our lives, it has become the meaning and symbol of it. “Live to die” – that’s what the media, advertising and liberal propaganda have suggested from all sides.
Capturing this tendency, Muratova subtly, as usual, embodied it in "Three Stories" - a masterpiece that was destined to become cursed and forgotten. Three stories about death - not in the sublime-philosophical understanding of it, and occurred not as a result of extreme events, but completely everyday, coming to you as a matter of course - like a housekeeper, regularly and on time. No matter how small and harmless you may be, you can not hide from death anywhere: neither in the boiler room, this paradise for freaks and marginalized people, nor in the maternity hospital, which, it would seem, stands at the origins of life, nor in a calm old age. Her Majesty Death knows you, sees you, and is coming to you.
And this is by no means doom. Unlike a mad life, death is calm and wise, it takes only those to whom it is entitled. And here it does not matter so much how death takes you: whether it slashes your throat with a razor, or drowns in a nearby reservoir, or even poisons you with rat poison. The only thing that matters is that it will happen at the right time and with the person to whom it should happen. There can be no mistake: only those who have exhausted the life credit allotted to them die. Maybe it's because you spent too much, or maybe it's just time, again, it doesn't matter. Just before death, all are equal: men and women, old and young, sinners and righteous. Even more so after death.
But this is not the main thing for Muratova. It is not so much the death of the living as the relation of the living to the dying. Muratova has no villains: none of her heroes desires death, neither near nor far, and no one clearly deserves death more than others. It just happens: a bizarre and unpredictable chain of circumstances leads to the fact that some are forced to kill, others to be killed, others to contemplate the death of others. The latter, by the way, include spectators - spitting, outraged and indignant. Because death, shown like this — without embellishment and fiction, in all its stunning everyday life and indecent naturalness — is disgusting. The viewer with good reason considers himself insulted - and falls for a subtle directorial provocation.
He, the spectator, unwittingly faces the horror and horror of what consciousness instinctively avoids, the end of life. Death has no face, but has many masks that hide the real horror. Even in horror, death is presented in masks, more or less acceptable to the capricious and vulnerable human consciousness. Muratova, on the other hand, does a terrible thing: without using masks at all, he imagines death almost naked. But thereby makes the viewer’s thought work, for to cope with the horror of the abyss opened, to reconcile one’s consciousness with the reality of faceless death can only be a thought that finds support in itself. Thought as the most powerful source of harmony and life.
Muratova is aesthetically consistent and accurate. The visualization of “Three Stories” in the most masterful way conveys the accompanying fatal nervousness and peace, obsession and insensitivity, randomness and regularity. The large and long plans of the faces of Makovetsky, Litvinova, Tabakov perfectly convey the spectrum of feelings of a person faced with death, and line up in a certain non-obvious line: from some detached, lost nervousness of the hero Makovetsky, through the cold curiosity and glass insensitivity of Ophelia performed by Litvinova, to the doom and expectation of the inevitable hero Tabakov. And in the chamber atmosphere of all three stories there is nothing superfluous, as it should be in the implementation of the sacrament.
The main character of Three Stories is life. Not death, not its victims, and certainly not a provocation. A life that only gets more expensive from finding its end. A life that is always bigger and more important than death. A life that death only makes stronger. A life that laughs and debunks idols, shatters dogma and prejudice, and triumphs over lies. Isn’t that why we make and watch movies?
So, three novels Kira Muratova 1997. And it seems a time when the syndrome of perestroika cinema began to move away. And all of a sudden, after so many years, a film like this is born that best claims to be perestroika. Let me explain why.
I was drawn to this film by a star cast. The only good thing is the actors. The film itself is a rattling mix of scenes and moments that were banned in Soviet cinema. There's nothing but these scenes, and they're eerily stretched for two hours. The whole message of the film was “We were forbidden – so get it!”
There are homosexuals here. It's got ripped throats and other make-up masterpieces. Opera singers forced to live virtually as bums. Sociopathic doctors. And, of course, the communal problems that sow Death.
This is the exact opposite of Soviet stereotypes. In Soviet cinema, life in a communal room is joyful and friendly, and even if there is a certain grumpy grandmother, she still grumbles for good, does not build nasty things and still loves everyone, and everyone loves her. Doctors are also kind, sympathetic, real “Soviet people” in the warmest dreams of the builders of communism. Intellectuals are always in costumes and at institutes, theaters and so on, and not at boiler houses.
Of course, the dreams of Soviet propagandists were far from reality. And killing your grandfather for a room is much more realistic than what was shown in the series “day after day”. However, if you take white and completely repaint into black – nothing good, and certainly smart and intellectual (as the movie is served), will not work. You will get a set of stamps with the prefix “anti”.
This whole stamped film is screaming about its essence. A corpse with a slit throat before 1991 would not have been shown anywhere, it is too cruel. So the director just shows it for three minutes. The most important thing is that the disgust and fear that such scenes should cause disappears after a few seconds, and you just get bored. This is the most boring and miserable scene in the film. Therefore, in American and Asian films, slit throats do not show more than a few seconds to have an effect. Here, the director reminds me of a child who screams “Look!!!” You can now! Look, I'm filming a disfigured corpse! What a master, the Soviets are jealous! But all this is so stupid that it causes neither interest nor emotion. Gays for a very long time pester the hero Makovetsky, and the scene is made so clumsy that even the text stingy, gays repeat the same phrases in a circle, again dull boredom. Therefore, the text here is not important, it is important that the Soviet viewer, relatively recently learned about the existence of gays, was horrified “he kisses on the lips!” Nightmare! It was forbidden!
If I had been born in 1960, I was shocked. But I was growing up on A Nightmare on Elm Street, and as a teenager I watched I Love You, Philip Maurice. And so the scenes for the sake of dirt do not catch me, they do not shock me, they only cause a feeling of pity for the director, who can not attract attention to himself by anything else, except, figuratively speaking, to take off his pants and show the fifth point. Maybe Muratova's other movies are better, I just started watching it. But because of all these shortcomings in the film completely lacks the atmosphere, the feeling of "disease" society it does not cause. In this case, if you remove a dirty toilet, then you just get a dirty toilet. And the fact that it exists is not a revelation, nor is it anything worthy of attention. It is noteworthy that a year later Balabanov’s film “About Freaks and People” was released, which created the atmosphere and in which the scenes of “dirty” are an instrument for its creation, not an end in itself.
2 out of 10
When a woman in Russia takes up the camera, for some reason very often this event turns into some completely unhealthy pathology, surpassing any of the possible creative perversions of male colleagues. The most interesting example in the cramped and uncomfortable terrarium of our women's cinema is the Odessa actress Kira Muratov, who has been terrifying the domestic audience for decades. Muratova’s absurd and disgustingly unattractive world of films was the answer to the catastrophe taking place in society: the closer to perestroika, the darker her canvases became. Even in “Asthenic syndrome” Cyrus put the sentence “ill” society, from under whose feet scavenged solid ground and left to go crazy at the bottom of the formed spiritual pit, somehow falling over with dry clods of promises of a bright future.
Three Stories came out in the mid-nineties, and here, as in a cold autumn puddle, the whole infernal reality of post-perestroika time was reflected. In the three novels, conventionally related to the topic of violent death, Muratova focuses not only on the collapse of the political system or the destruction of ideology (these processes have already been completed, now they are a gloomy background), she serves as a memorial service for the deceased world order. This rather stingy in aesthetic terms, the picture (the top of the local aestheticism is the long legs of Renata Litvinova spread across the tiles, strangling the victim with a stocking - at the same time the most erotic scene) is based primarily on beautiful acting works, and only then - on provocative plots. With a deliberately unartistic production, the camera captures in an absolutely inconceivable way all fifty shades of Litvinova's sexuality, a thousand and one note of madness in Makovetsky's gaze and Tabakov's last breath - entering the image of stunning.
At the head of each story of the triptych is a woman, in the last two she commits violence, and in the opening novel “Boiler N6” acts, on the contrary, as a victim, which, however, is quite easy to dispute. Nervous intellectual Tikhomirov (Sergei Makovetsky) brings to the boiler room Genes (Leonid Kushnir) closet, inside which is wrapped in polyethylene dead neighbor. He wants to get rid of the corpse - burn the body in the oven. Tormented by the committed crime, Tikhomirov falls into indecision and for a long time can not tell why he came. Several times he removes and puts on his coat, listens to the repeated tirades of the mad stoker, his ridiculous, meaningless poems, he himself carries the same nonsense. Tikhomirov does not find the spiritual strength to confess what he did, unconsciously withdrawing a confession on smoked walls to immediately erase it. The dead woman, with her inaccessible beauty and free disposition, drove a neurosthenic passive man mad, even with her vocal cords turned outward, lying under a shroud in an improvised coffin, in spite of everything, continues to remain beautiful, undefeated and no less free. Her killer is defeated and crushed, he is insignificant and disgusting, not in what he did, but in his cowardice to plead guilty. No less horrifying is the sight of the corpse of Gena, a moment before that ranting about murder, and for both men it is not a fear of violence per se, it is a fear of responsibility, primarily for their own lives.
The heroine of the next novel Ofa (Renata Litvinova), on the contrary, is free from cowardly frustrations and disposes of other people's lives without changing in the face. She is fully aware of her actions, purposefully and methodically fulfills her life program - to decide the fate of those who once assumed the same responsibility: having access to the medical archive, Ofa finds and kills mothers who have abandoned their own child. The deadly Ophelia loves only "paper and children" (the second is not long - until she faces her own possible pregnancy), the rest of the world does not even hate, he is just zero for her, empty space. When you look at it with your eyes, it’s the only way you can survive. If in “Boiler” madness looked like a deliberate grotesque and seemed more like a parochial insanity, in “Ophelia” it envelopes reality in a dense shroud. The city is a decaying cloaca, people are creatures descended to an animal state, condoning their own physiology. And the worst of them, of course, are men. Obsessed with lust, the doctor (Ivan Okhlobystin), who primitively “grooms” Ofa, is hardly perceived as a person. She is not interested in him as a sexual object, but not because Ofa is “cold”: later we will see that a girl can enjoy herself, but completely from other things. Ophelia doesn't need a man as long as she has her own and her "mission."
The final "Girl and Death" serves as the key to understanding the whole picture, decorating the mosaic folded by Muratova into a finished statement. While the mother earns bread, her young daughter is looked after by a neighbor in a wheelchair (Oleg Tabakov). This time the violence comes from a child: one day the girl will add poison to the old man’s drink. On the first level lies the struggle of the new and the old, the wheel of life and death, clothed in Muratov’s favorite motto “the falling – push” and given to the unbold hands of the “innocent” child. But this is only a superficial reading, the main thing here is that this is another perverse episode of the confrontation between the sexes. When the girl goes to the old man completely naked, repeating that it is “natural”, from her subconscious, furiously declaring herself, the feminine principle breaks out. The whole mise-en-scene - the garden, the apples, the "forbidden fruit" - flirts with the plot of Adam and Eve, but turns out quite differently: Eve chooses freedom, which does not imply the existence of Adam.
Women's freedom becomes a stumbling block for all three stories. A woman no longer needs to justify external beauty with inner meekness of character, no need to pretend to be a child in need of male care, which invariably ends in total control, built on a system of prohibitions without incentives, and domestic slavery. A man begins to realize that he is no longer the ruler of the world, but can not define himself in the new conditions. Tikhomirov’s aggression is explained by a deeply rooted unsolved problem: it is not impotent on the basis of suppressed homosexuality, or the opposite, but in any case it is an amorphous, unfinished, formless creature. Or the two blind men whom Ofa meets are a miserable sight, not deserving of her indulgence. In the image of an old man, Muratov reduces the role of a man to a helpless “talking head”, which can think, make sounds, may even realize the hopelessness of its situation, but can do nothing about it. The girl throws chess pieces on the floor, which the old man lined up on the board to once again “teach” her, and then without any order composes them back. It is trying reality for strength, and the shaky matter is cracking at the seams - the crazy world is only waiting for a push to fall apart. The man drove him crazy, the task of the woman is to collect fragments in a new way. But first, destroy the old order to the ground.
Three stories united by a common theme of murder. "Boilerhouse No. 6" - a certain Mr. Tikhomirov (Makovetsky) comes to his friend fireman Gena (Kushnir) with a closet in which the corpse of a neighbor killed by Tikhomirov lies. “Ophelia” – a nurse in a polyclinic (Litvinova) with the assistance of a doctor (Okhlobystin) breaks into an archival position in order to find information about mothers who abandoned their children in documents and cruelly punish one of them. "Girl and Death" - Grandpa (Tabakov) babysits his granddaughter Lily (Murlykina), who does not love him, and with all his childish immediacy seeks to show it.
As one of my friends said while watching this film, Kira Muratova was filming an art house even when the word was not in use by the Russian audience. However, unlike a huge number of post-Soviet films, in this film the form does not prevail over the content, that is, everything is filmed in the same popular at the time author's style, but the essence, the main idea of the tape is no longer lost in the wilds of pretentiousness of the characters and the delusions of dialogue.
The most controversial and indistinct novella was successfully brought to the beginning of the film. If you manage not to interrupt the viewing of the stories about the “Boilerhouse No. 6”, the very name of which should already be alarming, then everything will not be so grotesque and in Kafka-Kafka. The novella “Ophelia” strikes with the detached cruelty of the main character, who, clapping her eyes in a childlike way, sentences this world: “I would put 0 on this planet.” I do not feel sorry for her, and in my opinion she deserves a punishment much greater than those to whom she presented her personal account. The third novel about a girl and an old man is the most powerful, understandable, simple and at the same time spectacular. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she’s the last one. The calmness and immediacy with which the girl deals with her problems with her grandfather fills the heart with horror and anxiety for the fate of mankind.
It is extremely difficult for me to evaluate the performance of Renata Litvinova, because she is always the same, and this manner of her, to put it mildly, is an amateur, which I am not. It is also difficult for Makovetsky to make any claims or, on the contrary, bestow him with any praise, since everything in his novel was so crazy that the usual measurements in this case fail. But Tabakov and Murlykin want to praise - excellent, finely played roles.
As a result, “Three Stories” is definitely not a movie I would recommend to anyone. However, Kira Muratova is certainly an outstanding figure in Russian cinema, who has his niche and his army of fans. Either way, the thoughts and feelings in this film are interesting and still relevant, so the whole question is whether you like the pitch form or not. But this case is purely individual.
I've seen this movie before. But I was happy to watch it. Like the first time. Especially impressed children's "Lower, Lower, Lower", said with such life-affirming irony at the end of the third novel.
That's great. Lovers of madness, grotesques, caricatures this movie Muratova should fall in love with himself.
And in general, if you have not yet understood, then this is all from Chekhov, that is, not even from him, but from the surrounding world, the people themselves, who, no matter how terrible in their actions, thoughts, are actually only people.
Humanity. This is what unites us all, even when one has to tighten the stocking around the neck of the other.
Bravo, Kira Georgievna! BRAVO!
Like Asthenic Syndrome, this film entered the competition of the prestigious Berlin Festival. And this time Kira Muratova decided to neglect a single plot, but now she was not limited to the introduction of a separate prologue, but broke the picture into three independent novels - "Boiler N6", "Ophelia" and "Girl and Death". The unifying beginning of all three stories are murders.
In the first novel, an intellectual exhausted by a neighbor sends a bored bitch to the next world, after which he brings her corpse to the stove to burn and forget once and for all about the grumpy aunt. In the second (essentially key) story, a young maternity worker finds her mother, who abandoned her as a newborn, on archival documents, and then drowns her mother in the sea. Before that, she has time to test her principles and methods on a new young “refusenik”, who left the baby, strangling her under the stairs in the entrance. In the third novel, a five-year-old girl poisons a disabled old man who looked after her with rat poison.
Only at first glance, Muratova follows the fashionable trend of aestheticizing the “flowers of evil”, but, in fact, she continues to remain faithful to her unborrowed author’s vision, and regardless of the chosen topic. The originality of the style, which is determined both by painful naturalism and salon stamina, has long formed around Muratova’s films that cult halo, thanks to which the author’s name has long been included in the tablets, though marginal, but meanwhile always expected and popular cinema.
And in this sense, Muratova is more like a painter, whose reputation is determined solely by the originality of the style. Transferring several private techniques from film to film, she has managed to remain one of the most attractive figures for aesthetes with queries for decades.
The author’s “manner of expression” grows out of the provincial mustiness and inexplicable attractiveness of the old courtyards (here again as the main nature is the beloved Odessa – with a characteristic southern seaside saying from Privoz), from the endless duplication of insignificant phrases and creeping on each other replicas of bright non-professional performers.
Together with the pretentiousness of mise-en-scene and compositions, the catchiness of color solutions, where the agglomeration of colors, in fact, is nothing more than an artistic refraction of Kichevo philistine decor - all this is the essence of the director's corporate vision, not alien to human passions.
Without passing a judgmental verdict (Muratova generally tries to remove from brackets everything that is directly related to morality), and using “krimi”, rather, as an excuse for stylistic exercises, she removes from the face of our time pretentious, but still accurate cast. In this form, this era is unlikely to cause nostalgia in itself, but it will remain captured by one of the most original chroniclers.
I remember how a few years ago her bearded colleagues-directors came out from the premiere screening of another Muratov film. Quite scratching their well-fed turnips, they sneered at the “climacteric hysterics of the Romanian misanthrope”, after which they went to drink their evening beer. Years passed, and they still continued to blow the foam from the mugs, however, the arrogance and condescending smirks have already noticeably decreased. And Kira Georgievna, like Chekhov, wrote (just with a camera) all this time her little stories.
Moreover, her drive and workaholism Muratova has already managed to infect several “girls in blue”. First Vera Storozhev (here she is the author of the novella “Girl and Death”), who later directed the film “Heaven”. Plane. Girlfriend. Then came the turn of Renata Litvinova (here – the author of the novella “Ophelia”), who repeatedly starred in her, and also later made her debut in the feature film as the director of the film “Goddess”. How I fell in love...
In short, the case of the “Odessa reclusive” lives and wins.
The film shocks the realism of the absurdity of being. To see it to people painfully susceptible to such reality, I would not advise, as, however, few would dare to advise. To understand it, you need to come to this vision of the world yourself, otherwise it simply will not fall into the normal consciousness and will seem abstract and fantastic.
A distinctive feature is the composition – both in the overall screen picture and in dialogues. Each episode is drawn and arranged with a still life expressing the mood of the plot. Amazingly beautiful ruins of the house, two yules with toys, blue tiles against the background of a stocking murder - everything is aesthetically and frightening. Conversations within each story, especially with Renata, are surreal fiction, the purpose of which, in addition to the art, was an attempt to reveal the inner world and the course of thought of characters who at first glance seem normal. What people around us say and do is filtered out by external standards of behavior, everyone wants to seem better than they are, but the urges to this or that evil flash in the minds of the child and adult, and, thank God, not everything is embodied in reality. The film shows the situation of their possible expression.
The picture can destroy idealistic optimism and win over naive faith in the universal beauty of existence. It literally throws off the veil of the matrix of consumer society, stripping wounded and irritated souls and leaving us alone with each of them for a while. And this personal communication is hard to endure, you want to run away, stop tormented by the awareness of such dirty poetry. At the same time, it is real, and we have to admit it and somehow accept it.
These three shocking stories from a world in which none of us would want to live, on a planet to which an irritable Ofa would rightly put zero, beautifully and truly show the underside of human consciousness.