That's an attempt. I feel ambivalent about watching this movie. I often and with great pleasure watch the film adaptations of classics, and Lord Golovleva is one of my favorite works. I hoped to plunge again into the leisurely sweet-spirited Gollev way of life, into a family life in which the sleep of reason consistently and uninterruptedly gives birth to monsters. But I was disappointed here.
When I watched the first episode, I felt like it was a series and I was watching it somewhere in the middle. And I was unlucky, and I included exactly the series on which the creators ran out of money. Fuzzily, crumpledly, from the fifth to the tenth, ignoring the inner logic of the work, I was told that here, they say, lived some such people and they had everything like this. You will not see anything in the film that explains how these citizens came to live like this. The film lacks many significant characters, in particular, the husband of Arina Petrovna, her eldest son, with the light hand of which Porfiry Golovlev, in fact, became known as Judushka. And Arina Petrovna herself, despite the very accurate work of Lyudmila Polyakova, looks “passable”, indistinct. And this is perhaps the most important figure to reveal the meaning of the work.
The formation of Porfisha’s personality, his rise and dramatic fall are influenced by his mother almost in a Freudian way, which allows the novel to retain an acutely modern sound. Judushka is the best that a woman like Arina Petrovna could give birth and raise. The fate of her other children is not just a background (as it looks in the film), but details that give an opportunity to understand the reasons for what happened and continues to happen to many, many smart, in principle, and educated Russian people. In the film adaptation, the characters exist as if by themselves, without any internal connection.
For a superficial reading of the original source, I would have put the film “a two”, but having looked at the picture to the end, I still changed my mind. The fact is that by the second series of the film, largely thanks to Denis Sukhanov, the lead actor, there was something that in a good movie is called the atmosphere and that after watching makes you think, experience and write reviews. I suddenly saw (and it was a pleasant surprise to me) not Judushka, the character, but Destiny, which found in my soul a vivid response and sympathy. This movie was worth watching for.
Over. For the film adaptation of Saltykov-Shchedrin, either an epic scale or a soulful psychological depth is needed. None of the filmmakers seem to have. I do not recommend watching the film for schoolchildren who want to avoid reading the novel in this way. And for those who know the novel well, why not?
5 out of 10