The 75th anniversary of the Great Victory is getting closer, and therefore it is not surprising that Russian filmmakers are turning to the military theme. But it is too complex and delicate, this topic, and an attempt, instead of a deep and objective study of it, to drag our own, very superficial ideological constructions into the past, turns even an interestingly made film into a vulgar agitation campaign that disorients young people. But the commandment “do no harm” is relevant not only for doctors …
The joy of the release of the next Russian film about the Great Patriotic War among the patriotic viewer has long given way to wariness. It’s as if you are opening a gift from a person with whom you have a very difficult relationship - you don’t know what is there, under the bright paper, suddenly what nasty thing? There are, alas, much more unpleasant surprises than pleasant ones.
Igor Kopylov seemed to undertake to catch up and overtake America in terms of the number of corpses, blood, lacerations, severed limbs and leaked eyes in the frame. True, American films of a bright anti-war orientation are mainly distinguished by such things. To agitate against the war the people who suffered the most from the war and who ended this war at the cost of huge sacrifices is a very strange occupation. And if the goal is different, then why all this? For some reason, Soviet directors, and other artists as well, could show the tragedy of the war without savoring naturalistic death and suffering, so much so that Victory looked exactly what is inherent in this word - overcoming a huge disaster. Brawny vulgarities like "we can repeat" appeared when these films, books,paintings and monuments began to be forgotten (one picture of Plastov's "The Fascist Flew" or a monument in Khatyn evoke much more emotions than the church crypt chock-full of corpses in the Kopylov film).
It is a good thing to treat the head-throwing dementia of couch warriors with shock therapy. But every medicine in an excessive dose is poison. And when the viewer for about five minutes is shown a soldier shaking and rolling his eyes, who carelessly stabbed his first German in hand-to-hand combat, his picturesquely bloody hands, then something is wrong. In general, the film is extremely overloaded with psychological digging - who and why was pale during the attack, who was "drifting" and who was not. As if the soldiers running across the field under fire have time to make such observations. The director tries his best to prove that it's scary in war, as if someone doubts it. It's also scary during extreme sports. The question is why a person overcomes fear, what idea drives him. But there are not many ideas in the film "Rzhev".
In general, the political instructor, or at least the commanders, those who have not been knocked out, should talk with the soldiers about why they are going into battle. But the political instructor - a hysterical, crooked boy with a markedly Jewish appearance - is only concerned with screeching indignantly, tearing half-venerated German pictures from the walls of the dugouts or running around collecting leaflets dropped from the plane. He is actually a good and decent person, but he does not know how to talk to people at all, the soldiers look at him like a stupid empty-hearted puppy. The company commander almost to the very end does not communicate with the soldiers at all, as if his rank was no less than that of a colonel.
The bearer of at least some ideas in the film is only a collective farm accountant, in the past - a capital teacher of philosophy. During a sharp heart-to-heart conversation, he blurted out that he volunteered to defend not the USSR at all, but Russia, which "was before and will be after." But even without this message in plain text, everything in the film conveys the author's idea: communist ideology, Soviet upbringing are funny, superficial and useless, and even harmful nonsense in this case. From her there were only problems and mutual distrust. The Red Army men beat the Germans exclusively on strong old-regime leaven with the addition of vigorous criminal yeast. Even the company commander - a strangely nameless character, but clearly positive - is in no hurry to join the party, and hardly because he is "not mature enough."
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This author's view is most vividly manifested in the story of a special officer who appeared in a battered company (a detail that is almost mandatory in modern war films and TV series). The special officer - a young, furious kid with the appearance and movements of a poorly regulated android - immediately joins in the epic with German leaflets, but goes much further than the unfortunate political instructor. He personally searches the stunned soldiers, pointing weapons at them. The scythe finds it on the stone when the special officer tries to search Kostya Kartsev - a brave, snooty and cheerful soldier with thieves' habits (and as it turns out later, with a dashing criminal biography). The camera is fixed on Kostya's face, distorted by rage, perseverance and purely criminal courage (Ivan Batareyev's performance in the film is generally above all praise,his character is one of the most memorable and because of this looks almost like the main character). In the duel of will, the special officer with a pistol formally wins, but the comrades unanimously acknowledge the moral victory for Kostya. Later, the special worker turns out to be almost the same berry field as the recidivist Kartsev - a former street child. Only Lesha Rykov, according to thieves "notions", "missed" and began to zealously serve the authorities out of gratitude for shelter and food, but Kostya did not. As a result, a lone wolf, not going to fight, became a real hero, and a stupid puppy loyal to the authorities, somewhat reminiscent of Bulgakov's Sharikov, only interfered with the fight, until an old, deeply religious soldier finally taught him wisdom. Later, the special worker turns out to be almost the same berry field as the recidivist Kartsev - a former street child. Only Lesha Rykov, according to thieves "notions", "missed" and began to zealously serve the authorities out of gratitude for shelter and food, but Kostya did not. As a result, a lone wolf, not going to fight, became a real hero, and a stupid puppy loyal to the authorities, somewhat reminiscent of Bulgakov's Sharikov, only interfered with the fight, until an old, deeply religious soldier finally taught him wisdom. Later, the special worker turns out to be almost the same berry field as the recidivist Kartsev - a former street child. Only Lesha Rykov, according to thieves "notions", "missed" and began to zealously serve the authorities out of gratitude for shelter and food, but Kostya did not. As a result, a lone wolf, not going to fight, became a real hero, and a stupid puppy loyal to the authorities, somewhat reminiscent of Bulgakov's Sharikov, only interfered with the fight, until an old, deeply religious soldier finally taught him wisdom.he only interfered with the war, until an old, deeply religious soldier finally taught him wisdom.he only interfered with the war, until an old, deeply religious soldier finally taught him wisdom.
So, the philosopher-bookkeeper is fighting for Great Russia, Kartsev, who is not really Kartsev, because he "likes it", the rest because they mobilized. There is also a seventeen-year-old boy, nicknamed "the pioneer," who added a year to himself, fearing that the war would end without him. However, there is nothing "pioneer" in him, he even vaguely imagines what enemy he went out to fight, and takes the Germans for a "cultured nation." He kills his first fascist only after he looked at the corpses of peasants in the basement of the church, and even then in a desperate situation. This murder is shown with a claim to philosophical depth - against the background of burning crosses and either blessing or condemning images of saints.
By the way, the military superiority of the Germans oozes from the screen, starting from well-equipped trenches and all sorts of tasty trophy gizmos to the decision not to storm our positions in Ovsyannikovo, but to bombard them with mines (while the backward Red Army is forced to fill the enemy with corpses). On the one hand, the superior enemy is still beaten, on the other hand, the conscious heroism of Soviet (and, according to the film, no Soviet soldiers at all) is called into question, and a thick smog of reproach against the immediate superiors and the authorities in general hangs over everything that happens. Is the soldier a hero who is backed up against the wall and forced to fight almost with his teeth due to the fact that there is no artillery? Is it heroism or just a survival instinct? However, no one is running, so they are heroes after all. Probably…
I must say that the actual hostilities against the Germans in the film take only a small part at the beginning and at the end. The whole middle is given to various showdowns between their own and attempts to expose these very own people and send them "to the expense" or at least cheat on little things. Instead of a fighting brotherhood, we see, if not spiders in a bank, then an incredibly motley company that does not trust each other and the authorities, and the authorities totally do not trust them. It looks much more like a camp than a combat unit. This can partly be attributed to the fact that the company has just been reformed and thrown into battle, but only partly. There is no idea that holds everyone together - neither passionate love for the Motherland, nor hatred for the enemy, not a single faith (although faith is promoted in every possible way). Why, after all, these exhausted strangers to each other do not scatter? Riddle …
Due to the oppressive atmosphere of general distrust and walking on the brink of being shot, it is difficult to immediately decipher the meaning embedded in one of the film's strong scenes. German intelligence stumbles upon the wounded special officer Rykov and his orderly Vlasyuk in the field. The thrifty Vlasyuk immediately takes out a leaflet-pass from his bosom (plus a lot to the "discernment" and "vigilance" of the special officer), but this is not enough for the German, he orders the weak Ukrainian to shoot Rykov. Vlasyuk cannot do this and commits suicide. The German officer throws contemptuously: “They are all like that, these pigs. Nothing, we'll teach them how to kill each other. " You don't immediately understand that this is a reference to the events in Donbass. Not only is the hint blurred, it is also ambiguous - you might think that the militias were also "taught by the Nazis" to kill Ukrainian punishers.
To the ideological ambiguity and amorphousness of the film, one can add obvious plot holes and stretches. It is not clear how the robber hiding from justice so easily managed to get into the army using stolen documents (he did not get surrounded, but volunteered in Moscow!) And why Rykov led the arrested old man through the field under fire. And the fact that in the bushes … sorry, in the cracks behind the boards turned out to be a pioneer who knows German perfectly well, Somov, who managed to overhear the order to fire a mortar, fight off a hardened German with a knife and get to his own people without a scratch, and does cause a little nervous laugh.
To summarize, it is not at all a mediocre film, made boldly, bitingly and even somewhat provocatively, instead of a new word in the chronicle of the war, he added another verse to the same old song about the backwardness of the USSR, the mediocrity of the Soviet command, "filling the enemy with corpses" and totalitarian Bolshevik horrors, "despite which" the Russian man, with God's help, nevertheless won. What is new here is that everything Soviet and communist is shown not as hateful and disgusting, but ridiculous and ridiculous. A kind of "holiday of disobedience" of ill-mannered arrogant children, swinging at the sacred and eternal. The cherry on top of the cake is a red star in the title in place of the letter Ж in the word RZHEV. Maybe this is not a deliberate mockery, but just a design refinement, but this detail fits perfectly into the general concept of the film.
And as if people from the front did not write that they were fighting for a socialist Motherland and the happiness of mankind, they did not bequeathed to consider themselves communists if they perish, did not turn to the political instructor for advice, did not carry red banners on their bodies from the environment. If everything was "in spite of", then why only the Soviet Union withstood and dealt a fatal blow to fascism, being not overseas, but in the heat of war? Only with God's help? Or was there something new and unprecedented in Soviet people, about which the superbly debugged war machine of the Nazis broke off its teeth? And isn't it then that nowadays everything that is Soviet is spat upon and ridiculed, something that has lived more than one generation of ancestors is nullified, so that this miracle, if anything, will never happen again - despite all the boastful promises to "repeat"? Well, if you send volley after volley into your own past,then the future will be covered with a nuclear explosion, and there will be no one to lament that they were aiming at communism but ended up in Russia. Even the most "well-meaning" boors who disgrace the memory of their fathers and grandfathers who believed in a bright future, and not cozy heated toilets, are unlikely to be helped by higher powers …
Author: Marina Alexandrova
