Cinema is good when you dream that it will not end. The film “Doctor” (directed by Artem Temnikov) is just such a movie
Going to the film festival, I read in the latest issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda: women do not want to give birth to even one child. In fact, children have become very problematic today. Aggression, suicide, bullying of the weak, sexual promiscuity, violence, arrogance, gaming and virtual addiction, drugs. How to deal with it?
The second day of watching “Russian Cinema” showed that this topic worries filmmakers no less. What can be opposed to the childish sociopathy that is attacking us?
A drop of tenderness in a million baths
The children’s team of swimmers in the film “The Flood” (directed by Ivan Tverdovsky) lives their homeless, wild life of a primitive barracks life. Gnobit and bait one of the girls. After the death of her sister, she was taken in by the coach, whose husband, the head coach, made the girl a concubine. The aunt in complete frenzy kills her.
Such is the plot. It is told, for me, almost obscenely: full of vile physiology and its disgusting details. But the critics accepted this shocking style, awarded the lead actress (actress Anna Slue). I found this movie to be a children’s theme.
The hunted girl was mute (psychological trauma), but showed signs of tenderness for the boy she liked. He accepted them. And even a chaste children’s romance began, but then it ended because of the boy’s attempt to move on to intimacy. For someone who had already been raped by an adult relative and for whom the boy’s tenderness was salvation, “a drop in a million baths,” as he called their training pool, intimacy was unacceptable. And the beginning of a possible love turned into another blow. And the girl let herself be killed by an adult woman who was brutalized with jealousy.
Children are a reflection of the adult world. Hypertrophied and twisted, so the children’s world is more terrible in this imitation of an adult.
Doctor heals us from pain
Cinema is good when you dream that it will not end. The film “Doctor” (directed by Artem Temnikov) is just such a movie. It is about the child psychiatrist Ivan Khristoforov (the last role of Sergei Puskepalis). He treats the very sociopaths, neurotics, aggressively suicidal teenagers who are formed by a sick adult society. Among his patients is a “Thing” who does not perceive himself as a human; “Fascist”, for whom the idol is Hitler and his plan for the extermination of “subhuman”; Zlata, whom her mother locked in a closet when she brought a new man into the house; “Strangler”, who plays “dog buzz” with the guys at night with strangulation; ten-year-old Vanya, whom his mother still puts to sleep in her bed …
Doctor’s diagnosis: no one likes these children. These are the kids who get hurt all the time. Their soul hurts. And the doctor knows how to cure this pain (the surname Khristoforov not without reason contains a root on behalf of Christ). Moreover, he treats not so much with medicines as with education. For everyone, he thinks out how to do it, finds his own tool.
But, of course, the main tool is himself. A kind and patient person who is able to love other people. That love that does not expect gratitude, does not require reverence, does not set conditions. He accepts the person for who they are. And takes him under the wing of grace-filled love. Another, after “The Carpenter” film-parable. With the answer – what cures our problem children.
I think the answer is convincing due to the presence on the screen of an actor – a great talent, unfortunately, who died shortly after filming and whose memory the film is dedicated to. Sergei Puskepalis creates an aura of such friendliness around him that you begin to feel and realize the healing warmth of natural human existence. Who wants to touch. And the lack of which so destroys our lives.
Raising a man
The film “The Adventures of Little Baja” (directed by Alexander Galibin) conquered me as a viewer, contrary to expectations. The Dagestan eight-year-old boy from a mountain village turned out to be so magnificent with his thoroughness, intelligence, cunning, funny adulthood that he involuntarily fell in love with himself. And the film literally dragged into the simple, organic, uncomplicated life of a family, not rich, but hardworking, inventing ways to survive and even “arrange a business” – hatch chickens in a makeshift incubator or buy a breeding bull, but then sell it to pay for the treatment of the family ancestor, grandmother Bahia. Frankly, for a long time I have not seen such a reliable, with a sense of good humor images of an ordinary, but happy life at the same time.
But the main thing that this film carries is the theme of raising a man. It begins with the fact that the grandmother explains to her grandson: a man must be able to kill cattle. Baha decides to help her and cuts the chickens’ necks. Then a rural teacher of advanced years explains in his own way the “technology” of slaughtering cattle, gives Baha a pistol and a dagger so that he can save the sick bull from suffering, freeing his soul. Baha took pity on the bull, and only pretended to shoot at him.
Then I heard how my grandmother declared herself the eldest in the family, which gave her the right to decide everything – and right there he declared his right, as a family member, to know everything about her and have the right to vote. And so, detail by detail, all new ideas of the boy about what a real man should be are strung together: skillful and caring, ready to cope even with murder, if it is included in the list of chores, but thrifty and protecting family well-being.
Life itself, when it flows naturally and according to the laws of proper organization, becomes an educator.
Is it really only high in the inaccessible mountains that the way of such a life has been preserved so far?
The soul is disturbed by today’s films. What awaits the viewer tomorrow?
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On April 21, the Central House of Cinema hosted the opening of the Russian Cinema program as part of the 45th MIFF. Films were shown: “The Traveler”, “Nuremberg”, “The Carpenter” (more)
