In the square dume - three hundred sazhens Surprisingly, sometimes dissident opuses are the most ideologically toothless. Indeed, to find in the “White Nights Wires”, the only fully preserved directorial work of Julian Panich, who left the Union in the early seventies, sedition, anti-Soviet and other pocket figs, the regime still failed and the most flammable of the domestic fighters of tyrants. Perhaps that is why the film is now tightly and confidently forgotten (unlike, for example, the almanac “Love” by Mikhail Kalik). Meanwhile, the level of directorial skill shown by Panich in Wires is all the more striking because it is precisely this profession that he never studied, being an actor with a diploma - and an actor very average, truly unremarkable nothing but bright (in his youth) external data. One can only guess to what heights the Panich-director could reach, he did not strip himself, having gone to the indifferent west nowhere, to the errands of a third-rate radio station. Because in "Wires" he managed - nothing less - to determine the artistic code of the city, sat down, orphaned, confused after the loss of the sovereign porphyry. He in Leningrad clearly and definitely, logically, causally pinned to the screen this vague, Chescherovskie "In this park there is silence, but black on the background of the sunset branches naked as a letter, like slurred cursive someone. Only with us communication is broken, and it is hidden from our minds that this ancient ligature of the encrypted alphabet conceals.
Panich was not a native of St. Petersburg, but, as is often the case, that is why he learned the textbooks of the city more conscientiously than those to whom “straight walking is given from birth.” Rounding the narrative with a canonical passage through the canals, from the cramped granite of Moika, Fontanka, Lebyazhye to the expanse of the Neva, thereby washing and blurring the contours, like the damp and foggy St. Petersburg air, Panich remains in clear urban Cartesian coordinates, in geometry, in the future, in four dimensions, of which time becomes the main - since subjective. His cheerful men's company lives on Petrograd, in labyrinth-like communal apartments with bay windows, stucco on the ceiling, scraps of silk wallpaper, stained glass in the Art Nouveau style, the glasses of which rattle every afternoon when the Petropavlovka gun shoots. In 1969, they are twenty-five to twenty-six years old, therefore, they are children of war, miraculously preserved, miraculously bypassed by the blockade and evacuation of babies, over each of which the mother-old woman shakes, and the Motherland-mother, not knowing what kind of gingerbread to give them. Nina’s family lives on Vyborgskaya, not far from Piskarevka, her parents lie in the ground, most likely blockaders, a working bone, of those who dried and slept in the workshops, or even entered the battle on barely assembled KV, those who returned to dead apartments, but did not dissolve, did not descend, but again went to the workshops to work and bring benefit – and so survive. This is completely different, disturbing, free, but not homeless, for from an early age responsible, extremely disciplined youth, overlooking the Smolny - a monastery and a palace. Two worlds separated by the Neva and the Litein divorced for the night.
In this context, the growing cultural gap is filled with a very special meaning brought by Panich to the script cameo from the new, the seal of the blind-eyed creative search for the noted production of Romeo and Juliet, absent in the first editions of Vera Panova’s play. Editor Nina is still able to take Shakespeare literally, to see that actors play with varying degrees of sincerity and professionalism. Aesthetic, burning through life, ever-promising journalist Valerik lost touch with artistic reality, in his head he already has a post-modern, not abhorring to tarnish a beautiful legend, happy to turn Shakespeare into a courtyard song, and lovers from Verona into a couple from a spitting entrance. Two equally eminent families, the reasons for the enmity of which we will never know - two equally (as yet) respected environments, doomed to mutual misunderstanding because of the iron conviction of one of his own moral rightness, and the other of his own intellectual superiority. And in the middle there is a love itch, passions that will not save, unnecessary intimacy, stupid attraction of bodies, the passing summer, all meaningless rags clouds, roaring yards, on the stones of which you want to rush in despair, because love is stronger than separation, but separation is longer love. Panich had the intelligence and tact not to splash out, but to say goodbye to the city that has become his home (and Peter oh how rarely receives strangers!) with a sad tenderness befitting the occasion. He hoped, having left, to get from the island to the mainland (ah, Donne, quoted by Hemingway, as perversely interpreted then!), to merge into a real full-blooded, full-fledged life not of the country, but of the world. Peter holds the stepsons stronger than the children.