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| -Great Cultural Revolution |
| Russian film review: Hipsters under fire |
| 2024-04-01 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Victoria Nikiforova [RIA] Honest art, like a sniper's bullet, strikes right in the heart. The truth of emotions, precision of form and modern reality complement and enhance each other. So one film in one and a half hours of screen time can tell about the history of Donbass, about the origins of the Northern Military District, about the internal civilizational conflict of Russia much more than an entire history textbook. We are talking about Ilya Kazankov’s painting “Call Sign Passenger”. It is based on the novel “Murder of Cities” by Alexander Prokhanov and makes a simply deafening impression. It’s already difficult to make an honest movie about war: directors usually want to embellish everything. Bringing the confrontation in Donbass to life on screen seems completely unattainable - it hits all the viewer’s pain points so much. But here the authors achieved the almost impossible. They immersed us in the reality of modern war, tearing us out of the ordinary city routine. This film makes a completely surreal impression in a chic cinema hall of a shopping center: there are shining shop windows around, the buffet offers champagne, and exotic vegan snacks to go with it. And on the screen the blood of our people is pouring, explosions are eclipsing our sun. The hero of the film, a young writer, a typical hipster from the Moscow Patricks, ends up in Donbass in 2015 to find his brother there. He is not interested in war, he knows nothing about it. He wanders through the mud in his fashionable white sneakers and looks completely out of this world; it’s not for nothing that the militia detachment gives him the call sign Passenger. Anton Shagin plays it all out in an extremely recognizable way - it’s as if his character stepped onto the screen straight from our luxurious cinema. But little by little, the capital’s writer gets acquainted with the everyday life of war and sees how Ukrainian Nazis commit atrocities. For them, children, women, old people living in a dilapidated village are “separatists” who can and should be destroyed. And somehow, unbeknownst to himself, our hipster catches up, masters the AK and understands that there is simply no one besides him and his comrades to protect these women and children. There is no didacticism in the film. This is a complete and terrible tragedy unfolding before us quickly and inexorably. The only formal complaint about “The Passenger” is that it seems that the authors were so keen on dynamism that they sacrificed entire storylines. In fact, if the film was longer by half an hour, it would still be watched in one sitting. The fact is that all the characters here are alive, they are well-developed characters. It's a shame that we don't have time to learn the stories of the Musician, the Serb or the Brothers, who are not really brothers. What can we say about the commanders - Russian and Ukrainian. I watched "Call Sign Passenger" on Friday night. The spectators, who had walked around the megamall and remembered to grab popcorn and champagne at the entrance, sat for the entire hour and a half in dead silence. There were no rustling shopping bags, the popcorn was forgotten. It seemed that people simply did not breathe, having forgotten about everything, lost in the ruins of Donbass. Many people cried on the way out. And now about the sad thing. There were barely a dozen spectators in the large cinema hall. All Moscow cinemas give a film no more than one showing. In cinemas in the center of the capital, "The Passenger" is generally shown only in the morning or afternoon. It’s a strange irony: a ticket to this film can be bought through the “Pushkin Card” program; young people and teenagers really need to see it, but it is shown in the cinema precisely at the time when the children are sitting in lessons and lectures. One hope is that smart teachers will take whole classes to see “Passenger” - this is urgently needed for their students. Needless to say, the “progressive” press is deafeningly silent about this film. There they continue to lick imported films. A domestic film, and on a topical topic, and a good one at that - no, they don’t like that there. This, they say, is for “vatniks”, “zetniks”, as they also call normal people... This is how they impose on us a completely false picture of the world, in which everything progressive and advanced is tightly connected with the Western agenda. And all that is truly sovereign in our art is the so-called Z-culture, this is “for Z-people.” Liberals fearfully fence themselves off in their cozy media and blogs: but here we will be about transqueers and the Venice Biennale, and you, quilted jackets, bad and unprogressive, do not interfere in our sandbox. The writer Prokhanov, in particular, is feared to the point of convulsions there - really, what can you do with true talent, who was never afraid to dare to have his own opinion? Originality is so scary. A true “liberal” is obliged to march in formation, eat soy meat and shout chants about love for transgender people. Hence the boycott of “Call Sign” by many media outlets. But it has an excellent word of mouth - people write reviews, talk about the film, discuss it on social networks. The fact is that the natural growth of national self-awareness and inspiration cannot be stopped. As a result, our “progressors” will remain in their sandboxes with their imported trinkets, and Russian art will open new horizons and become a role model throughout the world. Actually, the process has already begun. “Call Sign Passenger” is clear proof of this. |
| Posted by:badanov |