Mystery of Tonino The mystery of Tonino Guerra's genius is unfathomable. This is clearly understood by watching Vladimir Naumov’s film “White Holiday”, based on the story of the great Italian “One Hundred Birds”, slightly adapted to the realities of post-perestroika Russia. Complex associative images are a kind of “thing-in-itself,” a mystery that defies interpretation.
The remarkable play of Smoktunovsky, Dzhigarkhanyan, Naumova on such a complex ambiguous material also tells us that only great departed and few of our contemporaries can work with such difficult metaphors without realistic scenario supports, penetrating so deeply into images. This also indicates that Naumov very carefully read the story of Guerra, was able to successfully adapt it, highlighting and explaining the actor such a complex material.
However, as the complex branched plot develops, in which the narrative is intentionally weakened and is a dense network of flashbacks and absurd episodes from the present, we clearly comprehend the nerve of late Guerra, declared for the first time in Tarkovsky's Nostalgia - the twilight of great culture, the advent of the kingdom of rudeness and vulgarity, the evening light emitted by the past, in which we were happy and the thick darkness of the present, in which all the values of European and Russian cultures have gone bankrupt.
These are the terrible realities of the 90s, the era of a new barbarism, total nihilism and cynicism, when museums and cultural monuments become a hindrance to monstrous construction, when statues and paintings live their lives in an open, nullified world in which all ties are broken not only in culture, but also between people. It is also the theme of the mature work of Theo Angelopoulos, inspired by the poetics of Guerra, admired him and entered into a productive, intertextular, creative dialogue with him.
Vladimir Naumov in this case showed himself to be the successor of Tarkovsky, especially Nostalgia, a terrible diagnosis of our time, when forgetfulness and mankurtism devour historical memory with a cancerous tumor, when only separate, incomprehensible and incomprehensible to others images in the imagination of the Professor, a man of old culture continue to live in the world as otherworldly symbols, no longer understood by anyone but him. We blame the intelligentsia for everything! While intellectuals have sold their cultural primogeniture for lentil soup of the mass cult and serving it, when even the family has lost ties, the wife does not understand you, and the daughter goes to the panel.
Scary is the last odyssey of the Professor, who goes to meet his own death accompanied by a Baroque double, an antipode, in everything he sees opposite to him, an obscene bogey, who, nevertheless, does his job of recording what is happening as he sees it, but what he sees does not coincide with his intellectual efforts to comprehend what he sees - taking the professor's daughter as an ordinary muddle, not understanding the meaning of much of what he sees, all the codes of interpretation in the hands of the Professor, who is taken apart, wandering time deprives even of home.
The rudeness of the realities of post-Soviet Russia is no better than the social and apocalyptic background to this international history, which occurs everywhere in the world in the 1990s, axiologically bankrupt time (Angelopoulos says this openly in Ulysses’ View). The melancholy of this remarkable film, the apocalypticism of its Boschian ugliness, signals to us the deepest unhappiness of the present, the temporal stop, when no longer lasts any duration, time has stopped and chews the past as the only food with a toothless, fallen mouth.
This world is over because it has forgotten how to remember itself, because it has condemned to homeless death those who have not forgotten how to remember, those who still want to love and believe in the past. It is a world in which there is no past and therefore no future, it is the hedonistic delight of the end of history, in which there are no longer and there will be no prospects. The white holiday is a celebration of death and snow, the white shroud that burys a great culture and its priests, it is a time of ugliness and boors who will devour themselves in hedonistic hell, drinking vodka and having fun with tangles, about no one will be able to set it on fire, because fire is the very element of this earthly hell. It's a frenzy, but not a life in which neither Bruegel nor Bosch are remembered, although they wrote the future, not the past. This is not just the end of an era, but the end of a night beyond which there is nothing.