Against the current The penultimate film of the classic of Soviet cinema and one of the founders of the film genre Sergey Yutkevich is curious not so much in itself, although the introduction of a commentator directly addressing the viewer and expressing his own point of view, different from the author's, looks unexpected and promising, as an example of what to ignore the audience's installations is more expensive.
One of Yutkevich’s passions, in addition to his love for Lenin, a love that was completely sincere (Sergei Iosifovich continued to make pictures about the leader of the world proletariat when more or less worthy directors had already turned away from him), was the dramaturgy of the late Mayakovsky.
It is no secret that the last two plays of this great poet with a tragic fate were not successful during his lifetime, and after his death - and even more so. No, they were, of course, staged in Soviet theaters - the "golden fund" and permissible satire - but neither the audience nor the theater people felt warm to them.
And indeed, rereading them now, with the exception of some really comical fragments that are not inferior to Erdman’s Mandate in their brilliance (however, this is not so much the merit of Mayakovsky himself, as the brightness of the type itself – the nascent Soviet philistine); Zoshchenko on the hump of this philistine generally entered the literary kingdom of heaven, it is impossible to get rid of the feeling of awkwardness for the author.
Mayakovsky plotted “Bedbug” and “Bath” purely and trembled on the rash of the day: they should not have lived until the next season, giving way to new dramatic agitations – for example, dedicated to exposing not the philistines, but the class enemy in the collectivized village.
But Mayakovsky soon shot himself, Lilya Brik reached Stalin, the “gorlan and leader” turned into an official classic, and the domestic theater was sentenced to the death of Soviet power to prolongation of “Bani” and “Bed bug”.
Yutkevich, who felt a personal responsibility for the fact that these satirical masterpieces, in his opinion, are reduced by indifferent descendants to a gray-borough-raspberry routine, for almost thirty years he fiercely fought for the rehabilitation of Mayakovsky as a playwright.
First, he did it at the theater, putting together with Plucek both plays in the mid-50s, then decided to transfer them to the screen, breathing new life into them: the film adaptations were not filmed performances, but, as they were called by domestic film critics, collages, when everything went in the course: documentary tapes, photographs, drawn and puppet animation and live actors - one, as in the "Ban", released in 1962, or several, as in the film "Mayakovsky Som", which follows in the main text.
The courage of the 70-year-old Yutkevich, who was not afraid to go on various experiments (“Mayakovsky laughs” is filmed in general “intestines outward”, when the inner space of the film is intentionally open and this openness is an independent artistic value), boundless modernism, turning into film hooliganism, an attempt to gain authenticity to the text not through his slavish submission, but through complete relaxation – all this should attract a narrow layer of intelligent public.
Not every day there was a work that exploded its avant-garde familiar and slightly musty world of Soviet cinema, afraid of formal experiments. However, “Mayakovsky...” this very audience tried not to notice. And the point here is not that the picture was a small screen: it really caused rejection and the desire to quickly forget it.
Why? Because Yutkevich, having decided to present the new Mayakovsky to the viewer, did not stop halfway, but significantly corrected the original play, giving it the relevance that it has lost over the past thirty-plus years.
Yutkevich completely changed the finale when the main character of "Bedbug" Prisypkin gets into a socialist tomorrow. Mayakovsky Prisypkin has no place in the new society, which is why they are handed over to a menagerie - as a living exhibit.
Yutkevich sends his Prisypkin not to the prosperous USSR, where people do not know what it is to drink and smoke, but to the wild West. There Prisypkin is faced with the arbitrariness of the police, nailed to the company of hippies, joins marijuana, becomes a rock star, and then, being at the forefront of the class struggle, escapes to a deserted island, where he has the only friend – made the title bedbug.
All this still looks rather strange today: there is too much sarcasm in Prisypkin’s adventures and too little knowledge of the true realities of bourgeois life, it is felt that the exposure was built on the peeped films – like “Heavenless Rider”.
At the same time, at the time of the release of the picture, this second series inside the “Mayakovsky...” was perceived as a frank wave of agitprop and spitting into eternity: the stalking hippae who were already pressed in the Union, Yutkevich, in the eyes of the intelligentsia, committed meanness.
“Why join the general choir, even if you do not tolerate all this youth-rebel culture?” was, apparently, the course of reasoning of the part of the audience who had enough taste to appreciate “Mayakovsky...” as a whole.
And, if Yutkevich had gone down the beaten track, i.e. reproduced the text of the play without updating, the public would most likely have treated the picture much more favorably, noting that, although, as it is now quite clear, Mayakovsky with his faith in socialism is categorically outdated, even from the "Bedbug" talented person is able to make a visual extravaganza.
But Yutkevich already had a bite to eat, and even Alexei Kapler, who was invited to the role of the Commentator, could not convince him. Kapler was right: an experienced playwright, he felt the danger coming. But Yutkevich, who suddenly returned to his blue-blooded youth, could not be stopped.