Author - Alexander Chantsev
The article in Russian was published on July 23, 2021 on the website of the web magazine “Peremeny”.
NO-ONE, the updated version of the film by Vladimir and Lev Prudkin premiered at the 74th annual Cannes Film Festival. А. Chantsev visited the show and shares his impressions.
Introducing the film, Egor Konchalovsky stressed that the picture’s atmosphere reminds him of Chekhov’s and Bunin’s works, - anticipating and snapshotting the revolution catastrophe through the transmission of signs and pressure of the impending and incurred ending, which were literally saturating the air.
In the film, the epoch collapse is viewed from a fairly remote distance. The events are taking place in Moscow (one can even say, they are being materialized, since the film - as in Pelevin’s works - hints at the Soviet-Masonic symbol - the hammer and sickle being interpreted as the Square and Compasses). The characters only listen to the rumored news, which like impinging waves reach their late summer leisured shelter. I remember how I learned about the coup in the country - there was no TV, there were rumors about a possibility of the civil war… My grandparents, who fled from Moscow, were talking about tanks in the streets... As Brodsky said, ‘Should you happen to be born in an empire, it’s best to live in a remote province by the sea’. Traditionally, ‘the province, by the sea’ has always been treated as a shelter from turmoil. – At the same time, the dust from the collapsed colossus is blown into the ordinary fabric of life by the wind of predestination (similar to the garbage and dirty foam cast ashore). In the Crimea (like in the time of the desperate flight of White Russians to Turkey after the revolution and like in the time of events of 2014), the heroes seem to be extremely busy with their own private affairs - the nephew of a powerful KGB general gets hot and heavy with his wife. But ‘private’ has always been intertwined with 'state', at least in the USSR it was definitely so.
In the perverted logic of the Soviet Union, the sacred symbolism is shown in an inverted, updated (as we say now) form. Communism is known to have ‘cosplayed’ almost all elements of the spiritual, mystical, emotional, and practical tissue of Christianity - the kingdom of heaven, the dichotomy of good and evil, etc… It had its own rites, teachings, martyrs, and even catechism. The same happens with Freemasonry. And if in the eyes of spiritually free bricklayers, Solomon's Temple, the First Temple in Jerusalem, (950-586 BC) symbolized knowledge, development, and union on the way to the sacred and divine, for half-slave half free citizens of Soviet Russia – with all their love to the USSR (like the love to monumental spatial architectural forms in Hitler-Speer Germany) - everything was different. The opening scene shows the nephew coming to the Central Committee Building to meet the General. The camera movement, the frames, intertwining light, and shadows convey the choking atmosphere of this huge building reminding one of a grave. As if in a nightmare or Kafka's surrealistic world, the heroes walk along the corridors and staircases. Suddenly, they ‘freeze’ and cannot move as if being caught (though in the very beginning, the General says in a hurry, that he does not ‘have a single moment of free time – let’s talk on the way to the office’ - a hint to the scale and importance of his work).
The General - Oleg Sergeevich - performed by Vyacheslav Zholobov, however, is clearly trying to extricate himself from the bondage of his position, power, and dominating reality. Oleg Sergeevich is a sleek and powerful elder, a real statesman with a superior smile of a Roman patrician. He constantly pretends, plays the buffoon, performs (even twice!), shocks his subordinates with his speeches and fits, casually mentions the Masonic symbols, and entangles his nephew in a web of the formidable hints (however, Vlad, an MGIMO student, and a future diplomat, is already spinning intrigues). In the discussions about the film, I heard that "such a general' may shock or even seem implausible. Out of step.But there are two reasons for that. First is the theme of the flight to freedom, the flight from an imposed role. In the very beginning, we see the General’s wife - performed by irresistibly charming Natalya Vdovina - excessively free for her social role, but literary tied up with ropes (almost like in the Japanese art of erotic binding, or Sibari). In the end, Oleg Sergeevich desperately swims at night through the storm from the Crimea to the Turkish coast – away from the imperial boundaries. He is striving to reach something twice non-existing - there is neither emigration Istanbul nor Constantinople, two sites-illusions of Russian fugitive dreamers. This, of course, is his personal retaliation for being a ‘cog in the state machine’ even though he was an ‘alien’ in this system - there was no place to hide from revenge, especially for an ‘alien’ ... Secondly, Bulgakov: figurative language is clearly emerging here. It is the result of a long-time joint work of V. Prudkin and V. Zholobov - the play “The Candle Ball”, the first in the Soviet Union theatrical production of “The Master and Margarita”. Looking even further back into the past - Vladimir Prudkin’s father, Mark, became famous after he had played a role in Bulgakov's “Turbine Days”(one of the main books about the end of the old world) staged in the renowned Moscow Art Theatre. And now, Oleg Sergeevich (like the demonic clown Koroviev), transfers his own vision of Woland from the play to the film.
Against the background of peaceful Crimean summer landscapes (sepia shots, shots with different color compositions, as if they are made with the use of vintage effects bought in a rarity shop) passions and bonfires of ambitions flare up constantly fed with fuel. Vlad sleeps with the wife of his uncle, the General, (“this is not a passion, this is more serious - this is a desire”) - incest, as in Rome, or in Shakespeare's plays. By the way, there is also a double bottom with a couple of surprises at the very depth - allusions to Othello, Tempest, Macbeth, and Hamlet (son versus mother, her romance with uncle, ‘incest sheets’). Revealing all the codes is the same as ‘plot spoiler’, that is why we'd better look at the deeper layer, which is not immediately evident. The deeper layer is passions and lust beyond the limits of habits and the Law that bound those real authors who most likely stood behind the name of Shakespeare - Christopher Marlowe (a writer and intelligence officer, who recently appears in a cameo in Jarmusch's "Only Lovers Left Alive"), Walter Raleigh (a writer, a statesman, a soldier and, at 30, lover of 50-year-old Elizabeth), John Dee (a scientist, an alchemist, a spy, and an intelligence officer).
Passions, in this situation, will go off-scale, of course. Youth against old age, private life against the state – based on such antinomies everything will not exist for very long but explode. Vlad makes an amateur erotic movie (a film in a film, similar to his uncle's acting in the KGB headquarters) with her in the title role, with the Shibari ropes and - her other lover. More than enough, isn’t it? Way over the top! But Vlad wants it: he sends a cassette with the film to his uncle’s office. An Oedipal revolt (how Morrison, this fan of archetypes, says in his song “The End”? - Father? Yes, son? I want to kill you. Mother, I want to...) is based on the desire to overthrow the rule of the older generation and sit on the throne himself (“You lost!”- shouts Vlad to the General in his dreams). But the old patricians are in no hurry to leave - the General together with his assistants comes to the Crimea to resolve the situation. The General and the nephew - they both lost.
The winner in this story is impersonal - the system. Together with the General, his assistant came from Moscow, a faceless KGB agent, a real nobody, no one, a non-entity, a void (the role of Alexei Agranovich). He does not even have a name, his eyes are completely empty, his words are limited to ‘wilco.’ But isn't this tiny demon the main symbol of everything that is going on? Speaking about the General, he utters the key phrase - "He did nothing, someone had to do it." Someone – is just a cog in a machine, but there are lots of such 'cogs - the whole Soviet state system. Those, who were supposed to protect lives, serve the state development, or stimulate progress, were engaged in exactly the opposite - the destruction of lives and the country. Again, we see an inverted symbol, almost a clinamen, which according to OuLiPo, is an exception that becomes the fundamental rule. A clinamen or a clink of the Soviet history.
The General disappears, but his Grey Eminence remains, this emptiness striving to look influential, which has come to substitute such brilliant and artistic intelligence officers as John Dee and Oleg Sergeevich, who once said, “They booted us out, overthrew us, but in ten years they will come cap in hand begging for our return”. And now the ‘generals’ have returned. Deaths and nothingness continue. Nothingness, like a constant vector of our history, is the outcome of any reforms. And if in Buddhism, the comprehension of nothingness - the Great Emptiness - serves liberation and spiritual enlightenment, the same symbol in Russia is inverted again - Russian Zen is meaningless and merciless.