What would a child do for their mother? It happens that a family for various reasons can fall apart at once, and no one can stop it. This discord has serious consequences that must be dealt with alone, with no support from the perpetrator of the destruction of the family. I want to look into the eyes of this man, but will my son have the strength to do it? A similar situation is presented in the psychological drama “Son”.
Synopsis For the past few years, Andrei has been trying hard to help his schizophrenic mother and plans to take her to Germany for treatment. Just before he left, his mother died. Depressed by grief, Andrei goes on a long journey to understand himself, to see his sister, who abandoned them five years ago, and, most importantly, to look into the eyes of the man who ruined their life – Andrei’s father.
Game of actors I can’t say that I was excited about the main characters. Regarding this film, we can say that the really main role here is one, and it was performed by Alexei Chernykh. He embodied the image of a real son who until the last tried to help his mother, sacrificed his work, personal life, but unsuccessfully. In principle, I liked the game of Vadim Andreev, who played the role of the father, who only when meeting with his son included paternal feelings, which, of course, did not help him.
Directing and script Since Arseniy Gonchukov is both the director and screenwriter of the film, I see sense in this section to describe his work from both sides. First of all, I would like to note how deeply the director conveyed the inner conflict of the protagonist. It is not just a family drama, but a psychological one, in which the tragedy of a destroyed family is the focus. The main character lives a boring life. This is emphasized by the black and white screen. All his time and effort he directs to the help of his mother, slowly dying from bouts of schizophrenia. He collects all the documents, breaks the laws and seeks permission to send his mother to a normal place where she will be truly cared for. But at the last minute, the mother dies. From shock, the hero leaves the house and decides to see all those who are somehow connected with his mother. The hardest part is meeting a hated father who left them years ago and has now started a new family and forgotten about the old one. Honestly, I love how this story ends, and that ending is fair enough. But only the viewer can evaluate. The only drawbacks of the picture were excessive protractedness and unnecessary scenes. So, for example, I never understood why the director showed us a date of a young couple in Moscow, which has nothing to do with the hero or the plot in general. The same can be said about the opening scene with morning exercise.
Result Of course, the film, as they say, for a lover of this genre. However, despite everything, “Son” is a really good movie that is worth seeing, if only because it touches to the core.
7 out of 10
To be honest, I don’t understand the number of awards and complimentary reviews that the film collected. The story looks so obvious that, as they say, otherwise is not given.
The boy has a seriously ill mother - schizophrenia. He loves her and suffers, and his father and sister left the family. The son lives a dream to take his mother to Germany, not to cure, so at least put her in decent conditions, but there is no money for this, you have to earn criminally. And when all hopes are crushed, the guy is unable to bear the sole burden and breaks down.
What in this story should be the subject of reflection, discovery, understanding? Sometimes it seems that the son is not quite healthy, really unhealthy, having inherited a tendency to illness.
Of course, this story causes sympathy, pity for the hero, resentment for his fate. But this is an external fate, which is not connected with the fate of the beholder. It cannot be assumed that this connection manifests itself in the awareness of simple capital truths.
There is no acute injustice in this narrative that would excite the feelings of the viewer, there is no conflict that would puzzle and make you look for an unobvious moral choice, etc. Everything is sad, then tragic and absolutely logical.
We can rightly say that the history of any serious illness, and even more spiritual, and even more responsive to the life of the family is an occasion for a dramatic story. But only for a reason. In any such story, you need to find those components that will turn a repeatedly repeated drama into a uniquely seen episode.
And you can also fantasize and consider the film as a mirror-turned plot of Hamlet (on the principle of form-casting). There is a suffering hero here, but he is obsessed not so much with moral choices as with a destructive love for his mother. The injured party here is not the father but the mother. There is a bride of the hero, but she is not going to die, on the contrary, there looms the prospect of a happy family. And if Shakespeare's tragedy is completely theatrical, then "The Son" is told as a one hundred percent life story. The only thing that is not mirrored is revenge (but in tragedy it is anticipated and voiced from the very beginning, and here it appears as an involuntary impulse). However, only this last circumstance is consistent with the statement of the director about the perniciousness of the inability to forgive.
I watched the trailer for a new black and white film and was excited. Russian independent cinema has a right to exist. It's not as sad as they say. And this is the main paradox of the genre, because they show such hopeless longing and sadness that you do not want to live later, let alone evaluate the technical nuances. But most often they shoot such a black woman with knowledge of the matter. In the work of Arseniy Gonchukov, I was immediately pushed away by deliberate pretentiousness. Here the main character ties his shoelaces for three minutes, he slowly takes money out of each book, etc. I understand perfectly well that in the art house like meaningful pauses, rare dialogues, close-ups and oppressive atmosphere. But here it looks like cheap kitsch.
There was an intrigue in the story. This very son from the name immediately seems strange and ambiguous. It seems that he is all so clever, goes to the library for books, calls his girlfriend to marry, takes care of his mother, earns money for her treatment. So what if he's a drug dealer? Life, as they say, forced. But he is going to spend on good things! In theory, you should feel sympathy for him, but somehow you do not want to. I even thought he might well deliberately stab his mother to death to get an apartment, for example. And all this collection of papers for a trip to Germany is just a questionable alibi. I guess I've forgotten how to trust people and I'm looking for a catch. But the idiotic smile of the main character really made you think about his dubious behavior.
A meeting with my sister and a conversation with my father will dot the i. And I even understand Andrei’s resentment against his relatives for leaving him alone to solve the problem, his hysterical and nervous grin, his clamped posture in an attempt to warm himself up. Technically, the director perfectly conveyed the loneliness of the protagonist and the lack of warmth of the family hearth. But all this is so depressing and gloomy that it remains an unpleasant feeling. Alexei Chernykh in the frame sometimes had such an expression on his face, as if he had been put under his nose by slops. I still have the same impression of the film. Although I understand the idea of the director and his attempt to make the hero ambiguous. No wonder he made the movie black and white! But I didn't like it. There is a sense of bragging in all this. Like, you all turned away, and I stayed, I'm good. Maybe he was a good son, which doesn't make him a good man. Something like that.
4 out of 10
This is how I describe my attitude towards this film. There are almost no words in this film, and they are not necessary, I think. In one of the first shots, where the son Andrew shouts shows a lot - love, care for the mother, experiences.
Absolutely clearly shows the attitude of a person who seemingly owns everything to someone who has nothing, but in fact it is the opposite. Maybe a lot of money, a lot of work, a lot of people around, but the soul is empty. The contempt and arrogance with which the sister behaves proves who she is or what her brother, Andrew, thinks. How and why such a relationship developed initially is not easy to judge, we only know that the mother has an incurable disease, according to her father. But a mother who gave birth to two children and became ill thanks to her husband, perhaps, who abandoned her, has only the right to shame, not compassion from her daughter, who decided to choose a big city and achieve everything there than to help her dying mother.
The son is tired of life, yes, despite the support of his loving Oksana, he was tired of love ... to his mother, who completely absorbed him, to Oksana he ran to feel at least a little freedom that there would be no pills, injections, tantrums, etc. But he ended up with his own son, realizing that there would be no freedom again. There is a law of nature in this: someone dies and someone is born.
In fact, it's hard to reveal what moved this man. In my opinion, after her death, he seemed to become freer - he was able to disappear, was able to shift things to another person, was able to ride the carousel, could do everything for his own pleasure, even lie to his father. He wanted everything to be as he says, so that he did not waste his years on such an incredible ending to his mother’s life. After all, he lived for her, he did not understand why his father was not interested in her life, why his sister did not visit, he suffered all the pain in his own way.
Some people can understand these feelings, some do not. Of course, his own child could make up for the loss, but apparently not in this case. His love for his mother is too strong, on the one hand, I would call it selfishness in relation to the future child, to his mother, to his future wife, who was alone, and to other people who were not to blame for the death of his mother. But on the other hand, it turns out that he blames himself so much that he can not live with it. For me, this film is very sad and very filled with different thoughts and forms behind which these thoughts hide, but still that I have learned the main thing - your soul. And everything that happens in your soul is reflected in everything around you.
I watched the movie Son. I have great respect for our Cinema when it is directed by such directors as Gonchukov and Khomeriki. “Son” won the Grand Prix of the prestigious Russian film festival “Window to Europe” (Vyborg) and other films Gonchukov has already participated in the Cannes Film Festival, the Moscow International Film Festival and many others.
High-quality, drawn-out - contemplative art house, black - white, chilling and tragically attractive! Such a movie devastates the soul and everyone decides whether to look or not to look, to look into the abyss or it is better to live without knowing sorrow. As one film critic said, the film blows by a mile “dostoevshchina” and, as we know, Dostoevsky is by no means a writer for an average mind and his novels can also seem “boring” to a lazy and frivolous reader who sees only what lies on the surface and does not take the trouble to look at the essence of things.
Arseniy Gonchukov (Nizhny Novgorod film director, screenwriter, poet, journalist) as well as Nikolai Khomeriki has a very important property for directors: inexhaustible curiosity about how individual human individuals will behave when faced with death or other tragic circumstances. He knows little of the answers to his own questions, but the little world, black and terrible, which he painted, forever cuts into the memory, leaves its mark in it. All the reactions of the characters are very human, although they are difficult to predict, the characters are broken and the psyche fails.
The movie itself.
The viewer’s attention is provided with the story of a young guy Andrei, who lives in a provincial town and cares for a mentally ill mother.
He loyally loves this already lost human image of the woman and saves money to take her to Germany for treatment.
Not disdaining any way of earning money, Andrei remains a good, whole person, he thinks of getting married on arrival from abroad and living a normal and honest life.
But . . . not everything develops as he wants and now the son, already distraught with grief, goes to the capital to see his lost relatives and can be forgiven and forgive them their sins.
The tragic denouement seems to emphasize that there is no justice in this world and sometimes people have to seek it themselves, but at what cost?
The whole action of the picture takes place in winter, when the trees are dead and naked and the ground is shackled by frost and covered with a white shroud of snow. Very symbolic. And the black-white picture only increases the effect of some kind of homelessness of the protagonist (the scene on the bench), his immersion in suffering, his unaccountable desire to find peace by achieving answers to his questions.
I thought at first that the action takes place somewhere in the 70s-80s, because in the shabby apartment where Andrei and his mother live, we can see the ancient refrigerator Zil, it is not clear as having survived to this day, the lack of any kitchen equipment, the wild poverty of the situation, dirt and ruin around the house.
But no, in the film our days and the filmmakers seem to deliberately confuse the audience, presenting the world in which the hero lives, to disgust primitive and spit.
Such a move undoubtedly works, because in such a world, black-white, cold, destroyed, there is no room for both forgiveness and love and life in general!
It should also be noted that Gonchukov’s films are distinguished by very strong episodes against the background of a rather monotonous narrative, so that the viewer who is not accustomed to such a flow of purely contemplative cinema may get bored with unusualness, but some episodes will, I think, be unforgettable for many. With bold, confident strokes, the director draws portraits of people only flashing in the film, but not inferior in brightness to the main characters and may even surpass them. So Flight. Three days after the catastrophe, a doctor sat in the memory of a drunken man who never learned to tell the relatives of the dead the murderous truth. He feels guilty before them, every time he puts himself to a bottle of cognac and cries.
In “Son” such an episode was for me the moment of Andrei’s meeting with a Moscow fifa – a sister. Cynical and cold, the girl is like a collective image of all those who left for the capital from annoying, boring everyday life for them, become strangers to their loved ones, but in fact, having already left, betray all that they left behind. They are not interested in anything but their own cloudless life and God forbid someone suddenly disturb their peace, even if it is his brother! They will be thrown away and passed by.
The actors who played their rather complex roles all liked, in the right moments there was the same heat of passion that made the film so real, sincere and terrible. The Russian soul is complex and unpredictable, especially if it is made to suffer constantly!
Look, the film is unusually well shot and the story in it is played out and at first glance not intricate penetrates into the heart. You just have to feel it with all your skin and not cry over snotty Hollywood creations. This film is made up of tears, taste them on your lips!
8 out of 10
The combination of hard life and family drama seems to surprise no one, but it turned out curious. Dramaturgical stretches work extremely successfully, causing not irritation, but empathy.
The film consists mainly of very long plans. Calling them “tight” will not turn their tongue. Surprisingly, the creators even tried to make a stripped-down editing version. After all, even I, spoiled by super-dynamic spectacles, never once glanced at the watch for all the action. The slow but very clear rhythm of the story is affected. Each episode is made as an independent scene, but does not break down into sketches.
I usually hate when a monochrome image is shot with a “digit”. But here it is done thoughtfully and very appropriately. The contrast image converges with the tough, unsuccessfully trying to get rid of all sorts of halftones, the worldview of the hero. In addition, thanks to this visual solution, the usual sleeping areas look completely different. It is for the unusual views on everyday things I love the movie.
Obviously, with such long shots, the work of actors should be colossal. There is no Kuleshov effect here. Heroes really believe, accept as living people, get acquainted with them. But the chosen directorial intonation leaves a strange feeling. Heroes are intentionally hyper-naturalistic to the extent that realism is replaced almost by naturalism. Just like the characters of Platonov, whose speech came from the subconscious, thoughts that would not speak out loud.
The attempt to dilute the “household” of our time almost Platonov turned out not quite successful. To try to pass to such a dead, almost inhuman intonation, he is too alive. Such a strange combination of the rules of the game, of course, makes an impression, but leaves a slight bewilderment.
This is hardly an attempt to invent a new film language, but as a way to diversify it, why not? It is better not to repeat this, but the film is good with this singularity, if you will, originality. I wanted to write a piece of merchandise, but that would be offensive to a completely author's film. Good movie, in general.
Watching only foreign movies, at one moment you begin to miss our family. This time I came across a black, like the rest of the Russian author's cinema, the film of the little-known Arseniy Gonchukov - "Son".
Charming black and white, and even through the screen, cold winter landscapes are immersed in the unsaid world of the Son and not let go until the last minute. It doesn’t seem surprising, slowly and quite naturally introducing us into his story of a poor guy who cares about his sick mother.
The cinema is definitely atmospheric. An hour and a half of the movie goes by and you stay depressed in it without even fully realizing it. Throughout this leisurely picture, I always lacked something, but the credits went and everything that happened in the film received a certain completeness and integrity.
As far as I know, everything was filmed for very little money and without the help of the state. So Gonchukova can be safely called a real independent director.
I won’t call this noir the best film of the year, but it’s great in its genre and has the right to have you watch it.
8 out of 10
There is a lack of human films. So that without special effects, without posters in all the vacant advertising spaces, without familiar faces in the frame - about people next to us, about love, about death, about forgiveness, about life, about being. Removed, but for some reason show infrequently and not everywhere.
The slogan of the new film by Arseniy Gonchukov “Son” – “Love without the ability to forgive becomes a curse.” Philosophical problems, parable, right?
These people in the frame are real people, they live next to us, in the same high-rises, in the same typical Soviet apartments. They ride on trains, idle under the snow at stops. And no one is immune from the tragedy – an encouraging thought, but also depriving of hope.
The painting by Arseniy Gonchukov is terrible, but honest and very human. The director does not need to resort to any additional artistic means to increase the impact on the viewer and launch the mechanisms of empathy for the hero in him. There is a Son, there is his mentally ill Mother, whom he has lost. There's a Father, there's a Sister. There is a family drama that the hero does not accept. The worst part is that he is alone with himself. And painfully trying to understand themselves and what happened.
Gonchukov’s film is an infrequent case when you do not pay attention to camera work and all the rest of the equipment, everything is so whole. There are stunning in light and composition shots, there are successful shooting points, but you concentrate during viewing on this: thoughts revolve around the hero. Why would he do that? Why is he smiling? That's because... Why would he say that? How would I be in his place? And you won't say anything to him, and you won't influence him, because it's a movie.
And a very good movie.
Apparently, not only do we watch some films ourselves, trying to understand something in them for ourselves, but the films also kind of expose us to the light, reveal hidden deep inside and not always want to be aware, but continue to secretly torture and disturb various manias and complexes. And there are cases when some pictures seem to resist your perception, and most importantly - personal acceptance: something unidentified and unknown prevents you to penetrate them completely and finally, while someone else, on the contrary, takes this movie surprisingly close to your heart.
Perhaps the third full-length film of Arseniy Gonchukov called “Son”, the history of the creation of which I seem to know quite well, belongs to such works that are not amenable to either intuitive comprehension (and I am a little envious of those who immediately and quite emotionally reacted to this tape), or thoughtful analysis. Feeling a certain conscientiousness, I would not at all like to make my claims to the author about the construction of the picture, the presence of separate scenes, including the epilogue, which for a long time remained incomprehensible to me. But to write a review just before the release of “Son” in the rental (and it will appear in a number of theaters from November 20) I still should. And the hunch appeared today almost on the threshold of sleep - when I suddenly realized that it would be better to consider this film in conjunction with the roll call with the two previous full-length works of Gonchukov.
I have already written about the fact that the conventional trilogy "1210", "Flight". Three Days After Disaster and The Son are three stories about how a person is forced to choose in a typical existential situation between life and death. It can be said in general beautifully that the paintings of Arseniy Gonchukov tell about “a Russian man on a rendezvous with death.” Although such a statement of the question is inevitably significant and pretentious. And to put it simply, the hero falls into a quite ordinary and even ordinary everyday trap, finds himself in a kind of trap, where he must commit several forced actions, without which neither moral nor physical resolution of the problem that arose before him is impossible at all.
If we rename the previous tapes of Gonchukov, it will be “Father” and “Brother”, which, together with “Son” really form a single cinematic triptych. In 1210, a retired military commander worries not only about the fate of his own son, but also other soldiers from his unit, feeling the eternal guilt for their death. He is both a father and a batyanya-combatant, and like our Father, bearing personal responsibility for all the perished, killed and injured, ready to sacrifice himself for revenge for the memorylessness of those who are indifferent and empty. In Flight, the hero, who lost his mother in a plane crash, hopes that the little sister will survive, and he is going to take revenge on the pilot, only his fault for what happened, but instead is imbued, in fact, with brotherly feelings for the daughter of this pilot, since the possibility of a love affair between them will always be overshadowed by memories of the tragedy. And in the "Son" also does not do without a burning desire for revenge and repentance, even if we are talking about painful showdowns within one broken family. However, for a particular person, seemingly unconcerned with the cursed “Hamletian questions” (although it is no coincidence that in our computer time he finds some temporary solace only in the silence of the library), the collapse of the private world is really comparable to the “disintegrated connection of times”.
He is so lonely, homeless and restless - and in his native town somewhere in the suburbs, and even more so - in vast and alien Moscow, in the middle of the returned winter in the first spring month of March, in a continuous whirlwind of snow, frost and fog, in a graphically emphasized black and white reality, which seems especially cold, artfully ruthless and exhausting the soul to complete exhaustion, when leaving this world is almost the only peace. However, the author does not abandon his “city traveler” in a night taxi rushing down the highway – finally exhausted and seemingly lifeless after everything he did.
The epilogue rhymes with the prologue in its own way. As the hero tortured himself with physical exercises in the cold, so he is ready to undergo more complex spiritual tests, accepting the obligations of fatherhood. Maybe in this way you should try to correct the irreparable - the departure of your father from the family and the subsequent painful cataclysms. Revenge and death are not easy, but simple and obvious. It is much harder to live on!
. The mother cries, the father is silent.
And the goat screams in the dark.
The clock overhead is knocking,
It knocks in my head. . .
Their conversation is shaking.
It is not because you hear a lie.
It's because they're their child.
You look like them:
You are as silent as he is (you cannot breathe),
Like her, a tear is creeping.
': Wake up your son ' - 'No, he's asleep'
He's lying there with his eyes open! .
And. Brodsky
One of the best Russian films of recent years I saw 'Son' Arseniy Gonchukova, whose work I have been following for a long time. Of course, those who go to the movies to relax and get food pleasure, it is better to go to the next film adaptation of Sparks, for example. But I know that there are a lot of real attentive and deep spectators in Kazan, and if we have a picture at the box office, do not miss it.
On the recent film by Nikolai Khomeriki & #39; Hearts boomerang' which I also very much liked, and now rhymed with a new picture of Arseny, in the only cinema showing the tape, almost at a single session, there was almost a full hall. The need for a meaningful film may be lacking in awareness.
The film is heavy, similar to 'Boomerang' both in character and mood. But there are many differences. Homerica's film seems to me conditional youth (a new drama on the screen, all things), which can cause, unfortunately, rejection among viewers over 40. A' Son' cinema is universal in a good way - I'm sure, for example, my parents would love to watch it. The heroes of Khomerica and Gonchukova are fundamentally different - a weak-willed boy in the first and a hero stronger than Balabanovsk Danila in the second. In general, Alexei Chernykh would like to wish him further career development both in the theater and in the cinema. An amazing actor. Reminds me of my beloved George Ivanovich Burkov.
Picture 'Son' is a separate conversation. Calibrated, smart and fresh. I close my eyes and see clear fragments. Here everything is extremely simple and at the same time filigree discharged. The frames follow each other so that with each new semantic field increases. The space at the same time expands incredibly, plows and with scrupulous indifference squeezed, eaten, cutting the main character with a stationery knife from himself and immediately packing, remembering himself.
No family. I don’t have a sister, and what a pain it is. Not about the separation of close souls - about the tragedy of cosmic loneliness. When you have to communicate with people, not take off the mask of stupid complacency, because under it too terrible, black through. When no one understands your life, your horror and your power, you can’t really be there.
I really want to talk about the subject, about the plot, but it may be later when you look. So only associations. The fourth chapter of the first volume of Trierovskaya ' Nymphomaniac' where about the father. And again, Joe looks puny compared to Andrey. In general, despite the unambiguous plot, it is important for me that the main character is a real person. He is, paradoxically, a positive character. Tragedy in the surrounding soulless emptiness, in these black tangled branches that hang over white columns, in this lonely timid music, past which humanity is in a hurry for business.
Andrew is a library card in a world where libraries have long been empty. He's a snow-covered tooth chair among empty rows in the black, closed mouth of the world. And, as in Besson's 'Nikita', he is doomed to exist in two worlds - black and white, which threatens to reduce him to the state of mother.
This is a beautiful, nervous, cruel and quiet film. A love that many of us are unfamiliar with. The illusory nature of the surrounding world and the irreconcilable reality of the inner world. About the emptiness of the big city and, by and large, about all of us.
“Son” by Arseniy Gonchukova or “Tough!” “Son”, directed by Arseniy Gonchukova The author’s film on the territory of one-sixth of the land of the former “great and powerful” is represented mainly by those enthusiasts who took the courage and enormous burden of being “everything”, engaged in shooting, writing the script, and promoting the film. A bright representative of this trend can be called Arseniy Mikhailovich Gonchukov – director, scriptwriter, director, producer of films that have received a number of international awards, such as “1210”, “Flight”, “End Situation”.
“Son”, a film dedicated to the director’s brother Artem Gonchukov, is a piercing story about love and revenge. The hero of the film – a guy named Andrei “Nero” – is trying to pull his mother out of the clutches of schizophrenia and the dull reality of a small apartment, where everything is surrounded by signs of a serious illness: pills, syringes, seizures. He has a bride, Oksana, sincerely loving the guy, but not feeling the depth of feelings of her fiancé, but just rejoicing in her love. Here, as we learn, he did not quite directly and honestly collected money for a trip to Germany, in a small boarding school. For him, this business, about which we can only guess, was only a means to escape and help his own person, he said to his companion: “Fuck it, you will go to hell.” A tragic coincidence forces the young man to embark on a journey akin to Odysseus’s – first through the far corners of his soul, and then this path will lead him to his “other” relatives – talk to his sister and father. Others – because they threw him one on one with all the cruelty and unsightly side of life. And these will be tough and complex dialogues, where no one will be spared. Why is it worth watching this movie? An interesting black and white art film, with an appeal to the everyday reality of snow-covered Moscow, and a certain “differential” action: the scene is skillfully aprokisimized by the director in a logical action curve, in the transition from the bright desire for love to the abyss of the madness of revenge, the desire to find a balance between “complete understanding” and the desire to trample the interlocutor.
This film can be attributed to the film "dialogue cinema", and the author masterfully controls the canvas. Of some inaccuracies, I would still single out the desire to “spot” moments that are standard for arthouse cinema, however paradoxical it may sound – this is what I would call a scene with a carousel in the park.
What to add – watch an interesting movie that will give food for the mind and appeal to your heart: do we value our loved ones, do we value them every day, with our love and care.
P.S. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Arseniy Gonchukov for the opportunity to get acquainted with a copy of the film.
o 'Son'. It’s a tough movie, but not a hopeless and protracted one, just a very strong one! Strong in its love story for the mother, who became the goal of the hero’s life so much that he replaced the whole real world. This love created the illusion to the main character that he can cope alone with the illness of his mother, but at the same time he really wants everyone, and the departed older sister, and the escaped father, and former friends of his mother suddenly were very surprised by the miracle he created, the recovery of his mother and recognized that this sacrifice is not useless with his life on his part, but a feat, and would be ashamed of their weakness. . .
I did not think the action of the picture was prolonged, on the contrary, a certain slowness builds the viewer into the images of the characters of the film. You become a shadow of the deeply lonely Andrei in your goal, following him through the snowy city, thinking, thinking and even dreaming. . .
I am incredibly sorry that the denouement of the film has already been revealed, and the viewer will not experience the emotions and impressions that I experienced, watching 'Son', to the music of Stanislav Polesko.
An amazing film, where there is nothing superfluous, a very personal movie.
Russian cinema is usually accused of being useless, and watching it is as harmful as eating Krakow sausage. This is completely wrong with regard to the author’s and festival cinema, which today generally deserves very high marks – just remember the strongest competition “Kinotavr” this year. At the same time, many films are by no means a spectacle for the “high-end” audience and are quite accessible for understanding the mainstream.
Arseniy Gonchukov’s son is a continuation of this chain of successful author films, which are primarily devoted to simple human relationships. Of course, such stories do not always catch careless young people (if they are not cinephiles), but prepared viewers will take a different look at the film, in which the restless son does not find among others love for his mother, which he experiences himself.
Arseniy Gonchukov made an incredibly integral film, which from the first to the last minute strictly obeys the author’s plan. SON is a very adult film in its content, and it is conceived and executed not for the entertainment of the audience. This is a test of the viewer for the strength of feelings and the ability to think about what he would do in a particular situation.
It’s also a bold and to some extent ruthless story about family relationships, how different even close people are, and how they react differently to the same situations. The Son does not give an assessment of the actions of the heroes, and there are simply no negative characters. The main character is experiencing the death of her mother (she dies on the eve of leaving for Germany for treatment), but can not share this feeling with anyone. Such indivisibility leads to a dramatic outcome.
Essentially, the Son talks about a broken family and the inability to return the past. The son desperately seeks a hug (not only physical but also spiritual contact), but no one, not even the future wife, can give him the response he expects. And it becomes even more painful because they are not guilty, and he himself came.
Undoubted success of the film is camera work. The black and white image is actually perfect for perception.
Analogues
The Boomerang Heart of Nikolai Khomeriki - the character of Alexander Yatsenko, who was facing death, tries to live as before, but more and more thoughts about the eternal occupy his present. It’s a beautiful and impressive work.
Michael Haneke's white tape - 1.8 million on 7 copies. The triumph of the Cannes festival as a harbinger of the future of fascism. What comes out of the family?
OVSYANKI Alexei Fedorchenko – 12.1 million on 35 copies. Miron Alekseevich goes to bury his wife Tanya, the company on the trip is a photographer named Aist. Three awards at the Venice Festival and applause from Quentin Tarantino, then a member of the jury.