The intoxicating laughter of tragedy. A deep, scary movie, inside which there is no way out for the heroes.
There is no God in this movie. Among them there is only the poetics of adaptation to living conditions, and the cold elements around them all. Of course, this is a delicate and strong portrait of time - "I am tired and time is tired," as Yuri Nagibin once wrote in his diaries. The authors show that 2001 is no different from 1981. The stylistic mixture from Kira Muratova, Alexei German and Ilya Averbach, a film made according to the classical Leninfilm methodology, apparently remained almost unnoticed. But I am convinced that the notorious “The Last Tale” by Renata Livtinova was created under the direct influence of the painting by Olga Leonardovna Narutskaya. We see a post-Soviet syndrome of a near-intellectual nature – not as crudely nailed as in the films of Kira Muratova (for example, in Asthenic Syndrome), although here the only way out for the heroes is to “go to bed.” “Culture has fallen,” as philosopher and philologist Aza Alibekovna Tahoe-Godi notes with sadness today.
A member of the Averbakhov film crew - his wife - screenwriter Natalia Borisovna Ryazantseva, here again continues the in-depth analysis of the destinies of the inhabitants seemingly nominally creative environment of the times of the collapse of the country, when the only effective form of survival is, at that time, just the one that yesterday was banned under the threat of arrest. Indeed, her deep knowledge of the psychology of the character of the writer, sinking ever lower in her tricks, analysis of his shelf, architectonics is truly amazing. There is nothing to add to this, everything is expressed succinctly and out of hand. The character of the main character covers and concerns the fates of very, very many people.
The brainchild of postmodern - striking roll call of the image of the main character
They are left – a base, rogue existence, arrogant adherence to the air and self-shutting of fear within oneself – as almost everyone does here. The doctor remains behind the armor of professional savvy, which still breaks through the infernal infantility of the heroine. This is the world of the occult elements of the creativity of the Soviet soul. This is a tragedy of an entire generation.
From the same film crew – the cameraman Dmitry Dolinin, who shot the picture in rather sharp, contrasting, but at the same time – heartfelt tones. Sound operator Boris Andreev creates the very Lenfilm sound breath of the picture, which can be recognized in 5 sounding seconds and it is impossible to confuse with anything.
This is the real inner, spiritual slice of behavior, logic, the life of its circles. People who do not need themselves, who repeatedly want to destroy themselves, with repeated suicide attempts, blackmailing children with their own death, total fornication, hatred, inner ugliness - and unrealized nobility, goodness, simply good, which should have been applied on some bright day - but left inside at the mercy of time. Left to spoil. You can walk the streets and watch it happen, just looking through the windows.
The film cuts from the inside the most behavioral algorithms phantasmagoric analysis of the behavior of people within the creative circles, and more simply - the bohemians and the simple intelligentsia, the remaining representatives. Here a person wants to be loved just like that - not wanting to restrain himself in anything, generally ask himself - and what he does, what he lives for; all this can be tried only on the verge of another madness, on a doctor's bed (and then - only when pressed, forced from the outside - with an instant desire to drive away) - another attempt to break through life poisoned by the devil, emptiness.
It bestows the love of other people’s children as a kind of competition, out of jealousy, out of a murderous desire to get jealous by selling love, showing that others never had it – to isolate their insignificance, insignificance, in order thereby to reap the fruits of the humiliation of others.
It should be noted that the author found really clear laws according to which a person kills and kills himself forever, not being able to recognize his own helplessness before God and himself and at least try to learn to live (not without reason they say about the main character: “she is completely defenseless”) – and recoiling blindly from all who try to help, let change. In order to protect herself from her own insignificance, she completely surrenders to chance, the elements, trades herself, completely betraying her soul - and is saturated with the aesthetics of self-immolation and the psychology of self-destruction. Many have faced this, but not all have died from it. After all, not cowardice, but the remnant of faith, love of life - with aversion to the fruits of her own life, the main character stops before another suicide attempt. However, the demonia that consumes her (and this is the true depth of her unchangeable misfortune within the Soviet social matrix) makes her subject other people to self-betrayal, slip and stumble, destroy her own psyche and the order of their lives. She just tries to live and play at the same time, builds an experiment, enjoys herself - the author, herself - the destroyer, herself the warden and the main character. There is nothing attractive about this intra-life death. It lives empty, destroying itself from within.
The heroine is completely suffocated by fear, which she seeks to drown out with fornication, antics, nervous outbursts or “creative” sublimation, during the course of which she seeks to reject the finally buying care of all those who so badly need the last thing she has, and, it seems, the last thing that no one has a right to is her freedom. Then she begins to ostentatiously renounce this very freedom, as if entrusting it to others.
As a result, on the screen we see either a deep borderline disorder and sexual disinhibition - or even sluggish schizophrenia, which is prone to all who do not want to stop and look at the fruits of their hands, previously feeding on lawlessness. The woman in front of the viewer is a near-poetic animal. In the end, the doctor who rocks her in his arms partly betrays himself, because he fell into her picture, into her inner world, viscous, controlling and flirting with everyone with whom she has to meet, waving his hand to subordination. She, like a child, is her own soul too, and everything else is given to the lifestream, or rather to evil. She finally becomes insane - although it was not possible to blame her actions from the very beginning. She is a victim of this life where you can adapt and survive.
In the end - absurdity, happiness-inverted simply from the fact that the fiction scattered and the snares of "creative" delirium - disintegrated. Finally, logic returns to the life of others; from hell, from the mirror, we return to the life of man.