Photo courtesy of the festival’s press service
Sasha is a taxi driver who prefers to work at night: he believes that at night it is more interesting to watch people and communicate with them, they behave differently, reveal themselves more fully and unexpectedly. Sasha is disabled: he has problems with his legs. She can walk, but extremely slowly and awkwardly (in fact, hence the name “Centaur”: she feels good only in the driver’s seat, as if the car is part of his body). It is also possible that Sasha is a maniac who has killed several easy-virtue girls in the past few days. But it’s not exactly.
How long, short, but the girl Liza gets into Sasha’s car. Guessing her occupation is easier than easy: a prostitute (more precisely, an escort – which, as it were, moves her up the ranking list, because an escort must also be able to hold a conversation on any topic; it happens that the clients even introduce these young women to their friends and turn them into children). Liza offends Sasha at first, but realizing that she said something unpleasant not only to a taxi driver, but also to a disabled person, she terribly regrets it. And he offers her a lucrative contract: for ten thousand rubles, he has to drive her all night through Moscow, from one point to another, from the client (“Now they will dress me as a serf and flog me”) to the pimp, that is, what sorry, the manager.
In fact, this same manager demanded that Lisa get into the car with Sasha. Those girls that the maniac killed were his girls. He himself is interested in finding the killer and handing him over to the police. And Sasha just went to the places where the girls disappeared the day before.
At the opening of “Bitter Fest”, where the premiere took place, the producers convincingly asked to do without spoilers, talking about “Centaur”. If you think that the main possible spoiler in this situation is whether the hero Yuri Borisov is a maniac or a nice guy, then you are wrong. There are much, much cooler plot twists. It probably wouldn’t be a crime to say that in the last half hour the movie turns into an action movie with gunshots, hellfire, chases, screaming, a mountain of corpses, a choking attempt, and an attempted fall from a height.
Well, and yet, without spoiling anything, we can say that “Centaur” is one of the best Russian genre films (and, perhaps, films in general) of recent years. It’s Hollywood in a good way: impeccable work, very clean, very spectator, very effective. You can find fault there only in trifles. It was no coincidence that Centaur producer Ilya Naishuller almost became his own person in Hollywood, having shot the action movie Nobody a couple of years ago (before him there was a very underrated Hardcore, in his unforgettable way and a lovely Kolshchik video for the Leningrad group).
True, the question remains: if it is impossible to discuss the events of the “Centaur” after the first half hour, then what to discuss at all. Except perhaps Yura Borisov, who here plays the main role: she gradually turned into one of the leading young Russian actors, and the Centaur clearly shows why this happened. However, the same applies to Sergei Gilev – in life, they say, the sweetest person, on the screen, without the slightest hesitation, turns into a real Satan.
Well, you can also discuss the question of how a person who hardly controls his legs controls himself so beautifully with the pedals. It’s asked in this film, but we don’t hear the answer. And you have to be boring to ask it a second time.
Centaur opens in full scale on July 13.
