Operation X. "The Milky Way will throw you a hemispheric shape." Love me, girlfriend, love me, baikal!
Movies have a period when they are particularly in demand by viewers, and this period does not necessarily coincide with the release date of the picture on the big screen. For example, the comedy picture “Come to Baikal”. At first glance, her screen life turned out to be quite short: despite the star cast, the film did not stand the test of time, getting lost in the history of domestic cinema among hundreds of similar “passage” works on the production theme. However, the relevance of the film today remains exactly the same as 53 years ago. Many viewers do not like when a feature film has animated inserts. This kind of “belittles” the reliability of the picture, transferring it to the category of fairy tales.
But Soviet film director and screenwriter Veniamin Davydovich Dorman does not hide the fact that everything shown is a metaphor. After graduating from the directorial faculty of VGIK (Kozintsev workshop), Veniamin Dorman for several years shot essays at the Lower Volga newsreel studio, then became a director of the M. Gorky film studio, where he repeatedly shot stories for the children's humorous magazine Yeralash and the magazine "Fitile". All the experience gained was reflected in the picture on the environmental theme “Come to Baikal”. Shot in a comedic and musical spirit, the picture raises very serious questions of uncontrolled fishing, and barbaric attitude to Lake Baikal.
Numerous animated inserts, as well as a certain touch of fabulousness - the "witch" of the grandmother-fisher Melitonich (Barvar Popov) - lead to the saying "a fairy tale is a lie, but it hints ..." There's no indication, though. The same Melitonikha “into the ear” to a visiting reporter publicly reports: “Soon poison will flow from the plant.” Omul fish is gentle, it will not tolerate. So it turns out - you live next to Baikal, and eat Murmansk herring! Dorman, well acquainted with the specifics of the shooting of “Fitile”, and here decided to use the same techniques. It turned out a successful combination of genres in the frame of melodic and soulful songs of Nikita Bogoslovsky. Let them not become widely known as other works of the Master, but filled the picture with depth and light.
The plot of the film is simple and even simple. But it is in the emphasized simplicity that there is a certain charm. Let there be no superbly bright images, but there are colorful roles of Ivan Ryzhov and Rudolf Rudin. Let the history of the relationship between Vali Belykh (Love Strizhenov) and Seni Lapin (Stanislav Khitrov) look somewhat crumpled, but it is filled with live songs performed by Valentina Dvoryaninova. Let the images of Terenty Kalach (Evgeny Shutov) and Boris Shtanishkin (Alexei Mironov) are too caricatured, but played perfectly. And there is – and this is the most important thing! – wonderful panoramic pictures of the many-faced Baikal. It's worth watching the movie for that.
The wind of the Baikal character is unstable: it is violent and desperate, then gentle and outgoing. Not everyone will make friends with him, not everyone will cope with him, and therefore, probably, I like this wind. ("Baikal Wind" music by N. Bogoslovsky, lyrics by M. Matusovsky)