Glow in the Permian sky This is probably the first Perm feature film in the post-Soviet era (and the second after Ivan Semenov). I'm not sure, I won't. It immediately feels the atmosphere, the spirit of the post-Soviet underground film, the energy of finding your face in the cinema.
And the mystical and intellectual entourage of the beginning of the film is a kind of reflection of the Perm provincial intelligentsia, brewing in its own book-aesthetic juice. Before the collapse of the USSR, Perm was a closed city with a very good intellectual level of the population due to the concentration of industrial and defense enterprises. In the film, it certainly feels like that. As well as a certain “puffiness of consciousness” and a lack of creative findings in detail.
And the plot of the film is not the most trivial for the Russian hinterland. A certain Order sends to Perm, the city of simple toilers and hard workers, severe and modest, a contender who must pass the tests. Then he must copulate with the Permian beauty, and their child must become the coming Messiah. The point is simple: to turn the Earth into a single labor camp, where ordinary people live a simple and simple, harmonious life. A kind of Permian version of the Platonic state, where everyone knows his place and accepts his lot as the original universal Harmony.
The Grandmaster of the Order entrusts this task to a colorful count, serving time somewhere in a hut on a castle, in the forests of the Urals. However, the Messir of the Order, in which the features of the prince of this world are guessed, does not believe in this stupidity. The count is entrusted with an alternative task: to rebel peaceful and law-abiding Permians. To confirm the original depravity and weakness of human nature.
The film is frankly lacking in scale, proportion of scale, including financial. The action in the middle begins to sag somewhat, the limited funds of the film crew are felt. At the same time, it is worth noting the sincerity, a certain authenticity of the actors in the game, although some naivety and straightforwardness. Overall, it looks pretty good.
One can guess for a long time where the first post-Soviet film in essence Perm turned out to be an occultist-intellectual ideological message in the spirit of cultural pessimism. Whether it is the secret aspirations of the mysterious “perm region” and the Perm intelligentsia, or just the creators of the plot sang by some “curators”, who, as we now know, oversee everything, is not so important now. The fact is that, to a certain extent, the picture proved prophetic in its appreciation of human nature. On this occasion, the viewer, comprehending the reality around him, can be sad, shamelessly.
The final message of the film is a kind of disappointment in "great ideologies" and "great achievements." Cultural and general pessimism about human nature in general, without touching a particular person in particular. “Freedom” = the collapse of good and the triumph of evil? Man as a species is inherently flawed and weak? Who knows who knows... Even Berdyaev, I remember, in his “Philosophy of History” clearly noted that the history of mankind is the history of its failures.
The first Perm film did not please the scale of visual and material, but was marked by an intellectual scale, a desire to at least raise initial questions at the very beginning of the thirty-year era that ends today.
In fact, the first attempt of the closed Ural millionaire to declare itself as a whole and in general succeeded. It is unlikely that the studio “New Course” (by the way, it still exists today) would remove something else in terms of capabilities. Perm Cinema party marked its existence in the then city of factories and fences, but so far it has completed attempts. The next attempt, significant for the whole of Russia, had to wait until the tenth years of the XXI century (Flaertiana is still a more local and narrowly professional topic). And in those years, the film became small, but the reason for the pride of the local intelligentsia, and ordinary people: “Look, we also make movies!” The film was one of the first phenomena that marked the coming “Permian identity”. Thanks for that, too. Oh, and for the old waterfront in the film, which spent so many pleasant evenings in his youth.