What about you? . The famous musician carelessly talks about creativity and life, quickly gets tired of resting in nature, deciding to return back. Having indulged in careless dreams, he is late for the flight of the plane, which crashes. Having outsmarted fate, the lucky man discovers that he is far from happy, because no one is waiting for him at home and is not particularly happy. The plot is simple. Just as simple as a TV show. Director Valery Fokin, taking as a basis the play “Each of the Greek” Victoria Tokareva, which we know from the scriptwork in a number of favorite films, not accidentally used the emptiness of the stage and one artist, all the time not leaving the frame. The story, which in four years will be embodied in the form of a full-fledged feature film with no less outstanding actor Oleg Yankovsky, here deliberately devoid of distracting scenery and much attention to other characters. Before us is almost a one-off performance of unmistakable acting and the subtlest emotions of Andrei Mironov, turning the narrative of a restless man into a metaphorical parable about human life, its meaning, deeds and their fruits.
The eternal dialogue with the viewer, the constant appeal to the camera lens, the piercing depth of the artist's gaze directly at us - he exposes the thoughts and soul before us, his dry tears, the asceticism of the environment, a persistent feeling of predetermined events, as if they had already been lived, and our hero, shrouded in the aura of death, suggest a completely non-random choice of title. After a lyrical introduction, the idea very soon creeps in that the author put an unspoken psychological thriller, an almost mystical chronicle of the soul’s wandering through purgatory, which is somewhere between heaven and hell – between heaven and earth. The mountain running through the trumpeter’s memories, where he climbed so painfully, becomes the personal “ladder of Jacob”, forcing one day to freeze for a moment to grasp that the peak of life’s path was once passed behind. Everything lived before the plane crash requires a painful rethink, allowing you to cast a critical eye on life, seeing yourself from the outside as charming, soft, seeking, thinking, but selfish and narcissistic. “No one needs me,” the wanderer complains. “You don’t need anyone,” he said. The melancholic journey through the remnants of his past life is filled with short meetings with loved ones, slowly appearing and disappearing almost phantoms of memory among the missing scenery - now faces are more important to the hero than small details of the conditional background. So much is needed to understand about yourself, meeting with a woman in love who felt relief from the tragic news, because there is no one torment her with false hopes. It is necessary to visit a boy-son who grew up somewhere far away, being the fruit of marriage, whose dissolution is accessible to reason, and the conclusion remains a mystery, so, not even the hour, he simply does not recognize his own father, leaving that he has two of them. Music, creativity, group - a sacred place is not empty. What about mom and sister? But is it fair to come to the door and demand happiness from someone who loves you independently and always?
The film, as if the sincere confession of an adult to himself, is full of anxiety to live unfairly, when everything around is just an annex to you, spare airfields where you can always jump in, spin in the sky and leave, leaving a void. But to the overall sad mood of the production is cleverly added inexhaustible encouraging optimism with faith in the future. It doesn’t matter if it happens in a prose story with a delay in the plane, which led to changes in the selfish life, or somewhere already in heaven, like a Christmas song. Dickens, there's always a chance to meet his own disheveled guardian angel to start over without repeating the mistakes of the past. This can become a man-made paradise, after the purification of sins in purgatory, because not every woman ignores the answer to the question of her name, asking her own in the desire to know yours first. Take care and appreciate the caring attitude to yourself, and personal indifference is the place on the plane that flew to nowhere.