Nastrojščik

Failure and success of Eastern European cinema combined -  two old ladies torn from the space-time of the bankrupt "Post-Soviet" era and their no less idealized (fake) friend, a tuner of musical instruments from dead times. Their interaction and environment are like a walk through the mustiest, most battered antiquarianism, and their behavior exudes the same fermé as the narrative principle that Muratova took from their long-deteriorated epoch - truly here one can revive, for example, Chekhov or any other embalmed mummy of the classic bourgeois novel of the late 19th century, which has switched places with Lenin. Fortunately, there is another character here who returns (not only) the post-Soviet reality back into the unfolding of history and this film, and that is the hungry, fleeting, valueless yet most vibrant, most authentic character - the femme fatale Renata Litvinova, who personifies another typical Eastern European trait: the extremization of lies to such an absurd extent that truth emerges from it, as this lie can no longer be believed and therefore it is not worth maintaining one's hypocritical mask in front of one's conscience (the famous West, holding on with nails embedded in its self-deception, still has a lot to learn here). That is also where those rare moments lie when the viewer can find flashes of authenticity and novelty of gestures behind the mask of affected embarrassing acting, for which in their absurdity toward the story, no other meaning can be found than that life finally takes a breath here, which needs no other justification than itself: hence the occasional hint of liberating absurdity, which Muratova so masterfully stirs up in other films, of which in this otherwise unsuccessful film, perhaps only another typified Eastern European language remains - shrillness, shriek as a frequent expression of comicality (from the Slavic Balkans through Romania to the Slavic Ural) and everyday reality. (06.10.2023)