Continuing a methodical but careful critique of the late socialist Bulgarian reality, Andonov offers us a plot scheme that is an inversion to his “White Dance”. If there to the main character of the autoinstructor ladies themselves flew like butterflies to the light, which allowed to implement a satirical function, literally without leaving the car of the main character, then in "Dangerous Charms" the hero, typical of adventurous poetics, dynamic, not sitting still, female seducer, aesthete and polygamist.
Of course, this is a classic relative of Ostap Bender. However, it is characteristic that if Bender is literally the last classical adventurous hero who can exist at the turn of the NEP era, and then only an exclusively planned economy and the complete absence of any grounds for adventure, then the Bulgarian adventurous hero is relevant as if nothing had happened even after 40 years of local socialism. The difference is that, despite all the similarity of the socialist countries, the differences between them are quite significant: the hero catches goldfish in the murky water of private cooperatives, not disdaining the small scale, he is equally profitable and large investors that wanted apartments on their own plan in an incredible in its quasi-architecture construction project, and modest workers of provincial cooperative life, producing tapestries or dolls. The latter, by the way, are even more useful, because Bulgaria has the same psychology as Russia. The police uniform is enough to bring terror without any verification of documents and the inclusion of common sense.
At the same time, the hero of Method Andonov is not a scoundrel at all. If there is anything in common with Bender, it is a kind of idealism. He's not really Koreiko, just remember the grotesque bar scene at the beginning of the film. He is artistic and cultural in his own way, and women are not always objects of manipulation for him, as the modest melodramatic motif in the middle of the film shows. Rather, it is the absence of any prospects. In words, society is moving towards a local version of a bright future. In fact, it is almost ready to degenerate into a petty-bourgeois “paradise” on the Western model. Nevertheless, mechanistic and groundedness cancel out the apparent difference of opposite systems. Maybe that is why the hero appears to be Orlovsky, or even Burevestnikov, because he is not a small intriguer, but rather a person of his time and place, unable to realize those ambitions that at this very time and place simply do not fit?
7 out of 10