And a French bun frust. I'll be biased. You can't call it a good movie. If we recall the literary pretext, it is a classic example of such a parody, which explicates the laughing element. This is another task, the task of a subtle literary parody, of playing with obvious cliches of more or less modern fiction. All Belkin’s novels are arranged in this way, revealing a significant divergence between the point of view of the narrator and the author, realized in an elegantly and precisely arranged narrative with its references to sentimentalist and romantic stereotypes. So, in “Shot” contrasted pseudo-Gothic villain and his frivolous, and then, on the contrary, an extremely serious opponent in the duel and attitude to life. The secret of Silvio, so excited by one of the regimental officers, is revealed through a change of view: the first part of the story is told by Silvio, and the second by the count. It turns out that this secret is petty, connected with the banal thirst for revenge and the inability not to play this card even at the sight of a person who is no longer a superficial youth. Pettiness is what characterizes Silvio in this story.
What do we see on the screen? Rather cliches and stereotypes about the nobility and army life. No subtleties are simply impossible to detect. Nobility and once again nobility, the comma enumeration of all those virtues that are usually associated with the word "nobility". The main thing in the film disappeared: the antithesis of the heroes. In Pushkin, this is a leitmotiv opposition of static and dynamic characters (remember Salieri and Mozart, the first of which is clearly serious, and the second turns to us with different sides of nature). And the “gulyaka idle”, and a person who is afraid that he may lose the most important thing in his life – this is also in the column from “Shot”. If Silvio exists sullenly in a mode of delayed revenge, not changing at all, then the count is a character that changes over time, becomes truly deep. In the Polish film, the characters are almost indistinguishable in their merits. It seems that he was filmed with only one thought: “It does not happen with the proletarians.” This is an illustration of the life and manners of the nobles of the past, depicted extremely distilled and one-sided. The antagonists are almost indistinguishable in their nobility and even, it seems, age, and in the finale they do not throw themselves around each other’s necks from an overabundance of aristocracy. The director did not take into account the laws of parody stylization, although it is time to ask the question: what does Pushkin sound like in Polish? is Pushkin’s plan preserved in translation? Maybe it’s the original cultural system “failure”, which became a hostage and the Director.
However, domestic adaptations of novels also often sin with such one-sidedness. In our version of “Shot” everything is also not very smooth, “Blizzard” turned into a sentimental story, and “Station Caretaker” Solovyov is so harsh and depressive that it seems that this is Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, and not the diverse world of Pushkin. So I repeat: the film is unsuccessful, the simple story of Pushkin is actually very insidious, and this insidiousness fully manifested in this interpretation.
6 out of 10