Don't sell your grandfather's apartment: he fought and got shots, and you only chased after a skirt and made bad movies! In the short debut of the graduate of the St. Petersburg Institute of Cinema and Television, Mahir Jananov, there are only two advantages (and then undisclosed) - the potential of the idea (not counting the inherent moralization and wretched finale) and the presence of a very characteristic actor in the role of a World War II veteran (given that older people have their own expressive charisma). Okay. Otherwise, this is an ordinary extremely unsuccessful work, which they tried to make terribly correct, honed, slick, justifying speculation on the difficult topic of fathers and children, but failed on all fronts.
Can I fill the universe with questions? What is the name of this disgustingly theatrical, 'replicable', still, puppet, flat acting game, which students of some universities love so much, when the people in the frame are not people, but appear only as talking heads and functioning bodies, and even an attempt to dramatize gets out of hand? What is the name of that type of cameramanship, when Mr. operator takes a super-new-born camera, sets it up for super-quality, looks for quite meaningful, in his opinion, plans, but at the same time shoots a TV half-screen and no panorama can bring to an acceptable option, but enthusiastically with his movements he declares that he tried like God, and it does not matter what happened like the devil? What is the name of the scenario in which the dialogues are a cast from the novels of Daria Dontsova, when the characters interact on the principle of pictures from the Internet (if happiness is to jump into the sky, if grief is to beat your forehead against the wall) and when the drama does not imply anything that would not elevate the viewer to the rank of an incomprehensible child, allegedly in search of a stupid, stupid, frankly banal morality in any story, for example, about patriotism or the torment of conscience, arising if you offend old people by selling their homes?
When watching "I'm back..." I got the impression that the work was done solely by agreement of the teacher and the student, when the teacher says: "Well, my boy, I want to see in your film good, conquering evil, and let it relate somehow to current topics, for example, about our country, about the relationship of father and son, because veterans should be loved, and then do it as you want, just bring the work, we have a commission, spectators, judges, we need a good and very instructive story!", and the student timidly replies: "Okap, Akappovy, the TV series will be very careful, the old actor, of the Russian apartment, of course, a very disturbing, the old actor, the last one of the apartment. It's perfect! Yes, no, everything just turned into the worst Russian TV series, only with an admixture of this inept “student raid”, if you can call it that, when the idealization of the form turns into a complete burial of the rudiments of life in what is happening on the screen, and instead comes out neither one nor the other, in favor of mass taste and certainly the subsequent praise, none of which meant an analysis of the degree of reliability of the film language or something even more important.
In the end, there are practically no interesting tricks that give out this film language or at least hint at the individuality of the author's style: everything is done by the most clumsy method - "What I see, I shoot." A flashback from wartime, no, did you notice that? Did no one make fun of the soldiers running in slow motion and falling so gracefully as not to get hurt? Okay, okay! I don't even want to know.
"I'm back..." is an example of how no student should make a movie ... if, of course, students consider cinema as a field for creativity, and not a brothel for telling contrived and fictional stories to please the teaching staff and in pursuit of fashion for love for the truths from children's fairy tales that are worn to holes.
2 out of 10