Frame from the movie Brother in Everything . Photo: kinopoisk.ru
Twins Mitya and Andrey Berezina (Sergey Zhuravlev and Nikolai Zhuravlev) are cadets of the Air Force flight school, hidden among the steppe forests somewhere in the south of Russia. Pilots have one dream — height. Both calling and heaven are one for two. They dream of conquering it on high-speed jets.
Two from the casket, two acrobat brothers. Two drops of water, perfectly tailored rhymes, a mirror reflection: gray-eyed, ruddy, strong, straw-hairy with a stubborn look. Diligent.
One whole — and so different. Yin and Yang. Mitya is calm, dreamy, tactical of any complexity solves. About the angle of drift and compliance with the horizon. And with the vestibular — out: in flight, you feel sick, you can lose consciousness. The brother will carefully shove a cellophane bag into the pocket of his tunic so that the fool does not tarnish the cockpit. Andrey — as if growing up, more courageous, stubborn, more determined, he has a girlfriend, Lera, in charge, and self-confidence, and strength. The problem is with ingenuity: for him, the “drift angle” is a Chinese letter, he won’t master the landing according to the rules in any way — he pulls the handle. He sits down, «like a bull pissed.» Almost killed the instructor. Pilot-instructor Batya (Mikhail Klabukov) after a test flight of him, like a little one, on the back with a belt. Then he exhales like a father: he has never had such difficult students. Add them up — what a pilot would have come out! But he looks almost with envy as the lovebirds look after each other — literally into fire and water. No, they cannot be separated, and they cannot be left together. They themselves are struggling with dependence on each other and … they cannot live without each other.
< p> Mitya wants to be like Andrey in everything. Walks behind him, «as if on a leash.» Is there a sense of unfreedom in boundless love? Can such a boundless love interfere? Obstruct. embarrass. Does it need to be fought? “Let me be alone,” brother will say to brother.
Here's how to tell about such a movie, in which the stories are in a three-line story. All on semi-nuances, light impressionistic strokes.
The quivering distorted air above the airfield. The shoe is leaky, the finger in the hole is walking. The soft sun reflected in a protective helmet on the dashboard. The sun beating through your fingers. Blinding through the spray of water. Bathing iron horses. Training of the vestibular apparatus: the cadets are spinning in a top, like compasses, around their arm. Domes of snow parachute silk. And the warped car, a dead, blackened heap on the ground. Shredded under the doge dies. Spotted form of future pilots, their faces are concentrated. The camera peers into bodily relationships tinged with emotion: the game of the Elephant, the trembling of the first solo flight, the touch of the girl. Small jet planes with a long sharp nose — an artificial horizon, look like curious insects. A long probe reaches the horizon to level the plane in space.
This light tactile movie reminded me of Nikolai Dostal's sunny and dusty Cloud-Paradise. Also about a breakthrough from dusty everyday life.
Cameraman Andrey Naidenov is a student of Yusov, a pure visionary. We remember his search for color in Vyrypaev's Euphoria, the expressive filming of a mass execution through the glass of a barbershop in Konchalovsky's Dear Comrades. Naydenov's chamber, itself weightless, now frozen in admiration on the ground, now tearing the fluff of clouds, transparent layers of fog, penetrating into the clouds. The earth flies towards, revolves around the plane along with the sky. Cars are drowning in the fog, «becoming a cross on the fabric.» The brothers glide «on the cloudy slopes», without flaunting, strictly fulfilling the tasks of the teacher.
Film frame « Brother in everything. Photo: kinopoisk.ru
Locators rotate round heads, determining the point of flight of the machine, its speed. Cadets beat the reeds with sticks before setting them on fire. Birds nest there, planes fight because of these birds. Seeds fly like dandelion parachutes. The fire eats dry stems, but the chicks did not hide. And the chick Mitya got lost somewhere in the smoke.
A new painting by Alexander Zolotukhin is a poetic elegy about the intimate brotherhood of paramilitary boys. About youth. About the sensations when the hands burn from kerosene or touching the girl's hand. And the skin freezes from the icy jet from the hose or the touch of the wind.
It seems that pacifism, as peacemaking, mastered, presented in the artistic method, is the main theme of the young author. His “Russian Boy”, shown at the Berlinale, is the same fragile and poetic film about a young man who went to the front and was blinded by a gas attack. About the blindness of the war and the only sighted — a blind boy, with the help of giant ears of the locator «listened to the sky» to warn fellow soldiers about the approach of enemy planes and airplanes. There, the shaky, pulsating image seemed like a nightmare of a boy caught in the epicenter of a planetary disaster, or half-faded, coarse-grained photographs that we begin to hear.
For the director, the sound in his “silent pages” is of the same paramount importance as the image. In the new picture, the rustle of pebbles, the rustle of reeds, the crackle of fire, the roar of the aircraft, the silence of the clouds and the chased marching step — somewhere there, behind the backs of the reflecting heroes.
The chamber film history «Brother in Everything» feeds on the currents of Sokurov's artistic poetics and Rastorguev's documentary method. Some scenes, for example, the everyday washing of tunics on the floor with brushes, the twisting of the washed uniform — a metaphor for cleanliness — reminded me of «Clean Thursday» with its bath-and-laundry train carrying washed-up rosy-cheeked soldiers who had just tasted sunny borscht … straight into the jaws of death. The director manages to combine in one frame the watercolor sky, smeared with layers of clouds, to which the characters aspire, and the earth — with all its prose.
And yet Zolotukhin is the direct heir of his teacher Alexander Sokurov. The school of the tactile approach to the material has been absorbed and rethought.
It is revealed in indescribable contradictions: silent mutual understanding of army-style reserved heroes, closeness, devotion — and all this in a world where there is no place for feelings, where there is barracks, the dictatorship of military duty . Oaths. Teams. Charter.
A similar feeling was in Sokurov's «Father and Son»: in the tactile relationships of loved ones, love woke up as a true relationship, hidden deep, buttoned up with the uniform military world.
Still from the movie Brother in Everything. Photo: kinopoisk.ru
Several important oppositions in the film. Alive, human, imperfect (like Mitya's torn vestibular apparatus) — and debugged, military. The pilot in the cockpit of a supersonic military fighter completely fuses with the machine. In an oxygen mask with a hose, in a helmet, on which the last name (just in case) — it seems like a robot or a machine. And so we move from the ideal military to the rough human. Along the edge, the sharp edge between peace and war.
Two boys in military uniform call their mother, each with an earpiece. Connected by one wire, and one voice in the earpiece — the voice of my mother. The cord is like an umbilical cord, it is impossible to cut. The force of attraction is stronger than gravity.
The mood color is melancholy. As in «Father and Son», two heroes are like one bifurcated, torn apart by contradictions. As with many of Sokurov's films, this is an exploration of masculinity and tenderness, detachment and intimacy. As in Sokurov's «Spiritual Voices», where the soldiers sent thousands of kilometers from home to the border and abandoned there, resembled the heroes of Deineka's canvases. Visualized images of masculinity, poetic sonority of rhyme in the curtains of meager everyday life. Both «Voices» and Zolotukhin's painting are filled with sculptural naked and dressed in military uniform male bodies. There are practically no women in this world. The only stranger is the local girl Lera (Alexandra Shevyreva), whom Andrei meets, and whom the infantile Mitya tries to “lean against”.
Performers and roles are connected seamlessly, it seems that not the actors at all, but the characters themselves are caught in the camera lens. And the Zhuravlev brothers do not look like artists, rather like their heroes. When they entered the Yekaterinburg Theater Institute, one of them was offered a budget, and the other a contract, they decided to refuse and try to enter the next year, to fulfill a common dream together. Their mentor Batya, Captain Zorin, was a real pilot Mikhail Klabukov — with a Hollywood appearance, quick tongue-tied, not always intelligible, lively speech. In his Bath there is a rare unity of military rigidity with warm paternal care.