Damn Veresen. Mykola Veresen in the movie prophecy, cops-punishers Z and murderers-hutsuls

In director Georgy Fomin’s feature debut, Mykola Veresen plays Ivan the Terrible on movie sets. According to the plot, the on-set director mocks Veresnya’s acting attempts: “What kind of king are you? You’re a crest in a fur coat.” Something terrible happens on set and Veresen goes to hell…which he doesn’t even suspect. There, she meets many stars of our beau monde in different guises: Les Podervyansky, Andrey Sereda, leader of the rock band “Komu Down”, Miroslav Kuvaldin, vocalist of “The Vyo”. In the 2013 shot-winning painting, the war with the Russian Federation is depicted as a prophetic war between Hutsul killers and ghoul cops. Focus He shares his impressions of Ukraine’s first garbage comedy.

“Veresen”: background

Unfortunately, director Georgy Fomin did not live to see today’s premiere – he died suddenly in the fall of 2021 at the age of 52. I have known Zhora since 1993 – from the famous Kiev satirical magazine “Damn” (1990-1999), of which she and I were writers. The chief editor was satirical writer Robert Vickers, who, in collaboration with Alexander Kanevsky, created all the material for the pop duo Tarapunka and Shtepsel from 1960 to 1986. The principle in “Pancake” was difficult and simple: each author read his new work in front of everyone on the editorial board. If they laughed – they dictated, no – bye. On Thursdays, everyone went through the procedure: it was not due to the outfit or fame of the author. The magazine was so popular in the 1990s that with the “Pancake Show” we performed in the best venues of the capital: KPI meeting hall, MCKI PU (October Palace), Cinema House.

Zhora graduated from infiz: he was a master of sports in wrestling. Many of his fellow students went into bandits, and against this background, he found himself a fairly peaceful occupation – a butcher at the Viticulture Market, regularly doing side jobs as a journalist. He knew the crime scene well. We all sinned with dark humor, but Zhorin’s style had the darkest tones. “Locksmith Petrov killed his mother-in-law. He chopped her with an ax. And he continues to walk and stare. And Ivanov’s father-in-law in Saratov is paralyzed, so he constantly looks and looks …” A story about how the murderers tortured a rich man by cutting off his limbs there was. Then they realized that they had mixed up the address. The piece ended with: “Goodbye, sorry. Feet in the fridge.” I criticized Zhora for “blackness” for so long that I began to give myself something similar, like a miniature: “The Mausoleum Restaurant. Cold appetizers.”

I also remember the story of another Zhorin. Unlike many – it was mystical and was called “Lifting”. It seems that he served as the seed for the plot of the painting “Veresen”. A racketeer was shot there. Takes the elevator to the next world. There is an angel sitting at the table. The angel says: “If you complete a task, we will send you back to Earth.” The extortionist accepts. He gets the assignment, goes down the elevator, gets out, and… shoots himself in the head. He gets back in the elevator, the doors open, the angel’s confused face. Extortionist: “I forgot to ask…”

That’s how Zhora’s thinking worked.

“Way of the Dead”

Now about his history in cinema. In 1994, Zhora entered the Institute of Cinematography on the course of Yuri Ilyenko (“White Bird with Black Marks”). Assisted in “The Hetman Mazepa Prayer” (2002). Mykola Veresnya Zhora saw in the theater “Mole”. Fomin and Veresen agreed on the basis of their love for the dramaturgy of Les Podervyansky. This is how the idea for the work “Dead Man’s Way” (the title refers to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 “Dead Man”), in which the main character is Veresen, was born. Who better to play himself than a well-known journalist and TV and radio host? Moreover, he directed programs such as “Without Taboos”, where there is complete freedom. Everything came together.

In 2012, the finished script for the tape “Veresen (The Way of the Dead)” was submitted for presentation by the State Film Agency, and in 2013 they received funding (partial). Filming began in 2016: a series of colorful reports from the filming of the “seventh circle of hell” appeared in the media: a torture chamber was equipped in Lenkuzne. The budget of the picture is 26 million hryvnia, which is consumed by inflation.

The film was edited in 2019, but our officials did not dare to screen it: It was a painfully powerful film. It’s done now.

Ukrainian hell in the land of postmodernism

The picture begins epic. Mykola Veresen plays Ivan the Terrible on movie sets. According to the plot, the on-set director mocks Veresnya’s acting attempts: “What kind of king are you? You’re a crest in a fur coat.” In general, this scene is highly symbolic and will fall into the golden fund of Ukrainian cinematography. He says that immigrants from Ukraine not only regularly entered the Russian imperial throne, but also won this war and became the most influential people in the Soviet Union for many years. Leonid Brezhnev from the Dnepropetrovsk region (General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, chairman of the USSR, term 1964 – 1982), Nikolai Podgorny from the Poltava region (chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, term 1965 – 1977) . But that time has passed.

It is also known that the decades-long conflict with the freedom-loving Hutsuls, with the Soviet power that came to this region in 1939 (features of the mountain peoples stretching from Sicily to the Caucasus) burned on fire. a form of postmodernist nonsense with mythological characters.

So an accident happens on the set and Veresen goes to hell…which he wouldn’t suspect. The panorama around it does not change much: the outskirts of the city, the tunnels, the evening metropolis. Mykola is unable to reach her home, but a friend who appears to have “died in Syktyvkar” (Fomin was born in Nizhny Tagil) calls her to warn her of the danger. “We are a civilized country,” Mykola objects to him. Given its location, these words convey the author’s irony perfectly.

Then Veresen falls into the hands of bandits, then is driven by a certain Chinese helmsman Mao (long live postmodernism) in a hearse that Mykola mistook for a van. In parallel with this, according to the plot, a certain policeman is looking for him (in the movie the cops – the cops – Focus) General Barmaleev. For some reason he needs Veresen. The general has a plan against the Hutsuls. The latter, together with the capital’s art beau monde, have a great time in the evil “Korchma”: here, for example, Les Podervyansky plays the role of “bounty hunter Larsen”, and screenwriter and director Marysya Nikityuk plays the fatal beauty. The colorful episode is inspired by Tarantino-Rodriguez’s mystical thriller “From Dusk Till Dawn” (1996).

cons

What was incomprehensible to the hero of Veresnya, has also long been unclear to the viewer: that Mykola is in another dimension. Not much has changed in the usual urban environment, and clues like the “dead” call don’t shed much light on this nuance.

For example, General Barmaleev’s command center (in blue uniform, but with stars on his shoulder straps) was telecommunicated with a torture chamber, where the bullying process was broadcast. If we were aware that this was hell, then it would be immediately clear: it’s their job.

There is a lot of naturalism in the tape – sinners are ground in meat grinders (a reference to the Alan Parker movie “The Wall” based on the Pink Floyd album).

Regarding the main “place of action”. How long can you die in hell? For example, everyone was shot, including Sergei Yesenin, who was already dead, but apparently quite alive: where do people go after that? To an even lower level of hell? The film as a whole has an indefinite coordinate system and genre.

Les Podervyansky’s postmodernist farce, flavored with profanity like Pavlik Morozov (2011), is organic in the form of various sketches. And Zhora has not yet found a movie language for this genre. The Dovzhenko studio school did not help much in his search.

Approximately the same story was related to the painting “Prayer for Hetman Mazepa” by Fomin’s teacher Yuri Ilyenko. It is still presented as a “historical drama”. However, in this capacity he did not go either to the Ukrainian nationalists or to the anti-nationalists. There are many directorial fantasies that fit quite well into the “postmodernist bullshit” genre, but the cinematic language for its presentation has not been found. Ilyenko brought it to the point of absurdity by making a film called UPC (Ukrainian poetic cinema) within the framework of historical and everyday realism. The film would smash international festivals in the “video art” category, but not in the advertised genre.

And “Veresen” is a mystical-postmodernist prose shot in the spirit of Dovzhenko’s studio.

professionals

The cool story leading up to the battle of Hutsuls and Cops on one of the peaks of the Carpathian mountains is a movie prediction of the war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. The general’s statement in the “Interacting with the Z Punishers” video sounds striking today.

Good jokes come out. Locals at a ski resort in the Carpathians convince the tourist that it is not dangerous. There are only idiots here. The abroad, where Romanians and Dracula once lived, is dangerous. At this time, in the “afterlife”, to determine the path in the damned place, the leader of the Hutsuls throws a loaf with a white cloth (Andrei Tarkovsky’s homage to the “Stalker”), falling into a funnel portal between them. dimensions and – definitely on the forehead of a tourist. it didn’t work

The painting grinds through a meat grinder the Ukrainian realities and postmodernism of the 1990s to finally leave the genre that has found its way out. In this vein, he is important.

The author also refers to the 1999 American masterpiece, Kevin Smith’s mystical postmodern thriller “Dogma,” starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fallen angels. Here, too, a terrible angel will appear with a sword in his hand. Some Biblical names come from the general’s lips, for example: “Raphael’s Way”, but it is not entirely clear what kind of path it is either. By the way, actor Oleg Primogenov is great in the role of a general. At the end of the new trailer “Veresnya”, a vampire juicy “magic” shouts like a criminal-police spell: “Damn I will!”.

Let’s also pay attention to the natural play of Mykola Veresnya in her own role – considering how many tortures her heroine had to go through, we think that all this was not easy for her.

The ending is almost a happy ending. In many interviews, Fomin said that the film is “about death and love.” And there will be love. It gives Mykola hope for a relatively prosperous future existence as a character. For such a “sin” as the role of the cruel Grozny, his hero could be tortured less.