Reluctant atonement Eva 17, she has freckles and dreams, in the summer before graduation, she works in a cafe and is almost invisible to others. But the incident makes her a star - because she tried to rape a famous singer. At least that's what she says...
If you expect a drama about lies, cancellation culture, and remorse, like Joe Wright’s Atonement or Thomas Winterberg’s The Hunt, you’ll be surprised. I am directly interested in how this plot was pitched for funding: 'And let's make a funny, soulful, kind movie about rape!' Or - 'And let's make a warm, cute movie, how a man was lied to, put in a cell, deprived of his job, almost brought to suicide - and nobody for it was nothing!'
This dissonance between material and form haunted me during the whole screening at the 46th Moscow Film Festival, where the film received, among other things, a prize in the nomination “Russian Premieres”.
It's hard to find a cute character in this soulful movie. Sweet girl Eva really destroys the life of a man - no acquittal such a stain in society does not wash away (as in the same "Hunting"), and does it as if by accident, with a sweet girlish smile. The authors deliberately made the man unpleasant and disgusting, read between the lines: "So he needs a goat!" Eva's parents are demonstratively separated from her daughter - show scenes of a mother-daughter meeting at the police station, where her mother literally looks past her daughter, and a conversation with her father in the car, where dad discusses her daughter with someone on the phone as if she was not there. The investigator in the infernal performance of Mariana Spivak is obsessed with the desire to jail men - anyone to make amends for their past failures. Eva's 'friend' - the young man Leo - is perhaps the main antagonist of the film. He’s a real-life control freak, a novice abuser who literally forces Eva to continue her lies in order to look like a hero on TV (and at the same time wipe Dad’s nose – another control freak). Eve's sister is also good - "lays down" her sister when she is comfortable.
Almost the only adequate episodic character in the film is a casual friend of Sasha performed by Dasha Vereshchagin. Now the face of the actress looks at you in theaters from every bucket of popcorn - she's Alice from "One Hundred Years Ahead" - but in "Lie" she plays a much more real and lively person - a girl who hides the real violence against herself. When her heroine appears on the screen, the fake "warm" atmosphere created by color correction and cheerful music, as if crumbles, and from the inside of the film another, a real movie without pink snot and this stupid giggling - oh, look, the cellmates gave the pseudo-rapist his balls, oh how funny!
I really don’t know if I would recommend this movie. It poses the right problems - loneliness, isolation, the desire to stand out at all costs, and, in fact, the price of fifteen minutes of fame, the culture of cancellation as a modern witch hunt. But the tone and format chosen are so unsettling that solving these problems, or even just discussing them in these circumstances, is almost impossible.
