agony Batrak by vocation and beggar by nature falls in love with the beautiful daughter of his master, but according to the rules of natural selection, the groom gets a turn from the gate. However, for a long time to twist the unfortunate working man is not necessary - suddenly Basavryuk, a local patimaker and a pure devil in the flesh, the master decides to come to the farm, arrange fiery parties with Cossacks drinking to the blue and shooting those who do not want to eat on the birch of priests. He offers the guy a deal - he will rip for him the evening before Ivan Kupala fern flower, and in return will receive a considerable part of the treasure found with the help of folklore McGuffin. The unfortunate lover, on his hoppy head, agrees, and eventually gets what he wants in double volume, because the ringing of magic gold attracts not only the coveted pannet, but also her father, who, without thinking twice, gives his own daughter into the clutches of an unhappy fate.
Passed before the beginning of his directorial career, a good school of camera work Ukrainian Yuri Ilyenko in his second full-length work completely gives the event component to the mercy of visual visual visual arts. Taking up with his own hands the rethinking of one of Gogol’s classical works, he completely deprives it of its original brightness, replacing the liveliness of the literary language with an inept and irrepressible abstraction of images blurring before the eyes. Deciding to move almost completely away from the traditional building of bridges with the viewer’s perception, Ilyenko limits the description of what is happening to the introductory title, designed to outline the exposition, but in fact almost does not carry any semantic load. The film is more like an animated illustration of a marginal artist than a work that can live an independent life, because without knowledge of the text of the story, it is possible to delve into the plot at once. Trying to impose a game in a frank art house, to create a movie “in its pure form”, Ilyenko is fond of demonstrating a “miracle” from the first minutes – a live pig emerges from a pot of pork, frightens refectory heroes and plunges the viewer into a frenzied cycle of mixtures of transcendent and immanent realities, the victim of which the director himself becomes. Local vacuum surrealism tries to clumsily replace the disturbing mysticism of Gogol’s story, but only exacerbates the helplessness of the grotesque allegory of the plot, almost entirely consisting of a chain of interconnected voids, which are not trying to fill with anything but a demonstration of inventive camerawork.
“The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” is certainly successful with some static shots and the construction of key mise-en-scene scenes, but the dynamics of editing and awkward manipulations with the perspective of the frame in an attempt to further abstract the crazy hallucinations of the characters from reality finally finish the picture, already poisoned by excessive symbolism. The attempt to make a psychedelic trip in the footsteps of the infernal obsessions of the famous writer failed, and the only thing that is remembered in the end is the censored cunilingus in the birch forest, which, unlike the main layer of kaleidoscopic metaphors, is not difficult to imagine.