Gilyarovsky – Porechenkov (left) opens the dark world of Khitrovka to Stanislavsky – Kryukov. Photo: Still from the film.
In the year 1902 since the Nativity of Christ, Lenin’s work What to Do?, the assassination of Minister Sipyagin, the tsar’s veto of Gorky’s election as an academician, and the fist-sized emerald Iskra Vostoka fell on Russia . It was a fun year, as were many that followed.
Lenin decided to throw a party, Sipyagin was replaced by Plehve, Gorky passed the play “In the Background” to the Artistic Theater, and the emerald horse became the hero of the historical comic by KG Shakhnazarov, a prophet and chronicler.
As the desire to prophesy finds in him, he shoots parables: “City Zero” about the puppet of changing socio-economic formations and “White Tiger” (without quotes!) about the immortal demon of anti-Russian western expansion, a relative of the Whale White from Moby Dick. Because there is no one to decipher the allegories of him, the criticism is imposing and stupid, the prophecies pass and are read correctly only years later. Then Shakhnazarov gets angry and thinks: I’m going to scare everyone with convulsions! Terrifyingly, I will let you down: terror, madhouse, regicide and transmigration of souls, but it is necessary to call Borodyansky (his scriptwriter from him). He calls Borodyansky: Sash, he says, write, do not resist. But he doesn’t care: he’s tired, he says, of mysticism, I’ve been writing about it all my life. I have many years, I will not.
Here Shakhnazarov reminds that Borodyansky is eight years younger and will have to write alone, attracting various lies from primosfilm.
So, the gala emerald, Gorky the non-academic, taxi drivers, journalists. The imposing dandy KS Stanislavsky (Konstantin Kryukov), not knowing how to play Satin, decides to infiltrate the bottom to find out, understand and finish his mustache. Virgil in the slums for him can be one VA Gilyarovsky played by Mikhail Porechenkov, who played the “Ninth Company” with Kryukov, and they have something to remember in fights with punks. The escorts embark on an excursion to the Khitrov market area, to which the Moscow Art Theater (not yet academic, like Gorky) is half an hour away. There they watch the homeless, are saturated with the truth of the boarding houses and meet a cleverly low-cut thief named Princess (Anfisa Chernykh), they say, the real one. The public is angry, where does the princess come from in the rygalovka, but it’s a comic, and the princess comes from Soviet crime fiction, where all the robbers are Count or Sudar, but the ancestor Gorky please. , Baron. Gilyai and Stasiai want to visit an Indian they know (you can’t find any exotic shacks in Moscow), but he’s already been killed by a poisoned thorn from Conan Doyle’s book The Sign of Four, which the heroes didn’t read. , otherwise they would immediately realize that they should look for evil dwarves. Chekhov will bring friends to the dwarfs, played by Ivan Kolesnikov, the Kolomna verst, as he was in life (Chekhov is generally accepted to be an ordinary bespectacled man, and the same height as Mayakovsky and Schwarzenegger). Bailiff Rudnikov, played by Yevgeny Stychkin, with a constant bark at the policeman “Maykov !!!” interferes with the search for the Khitrovskiy Lestrade. (When he was a director, he filmed the artist Maykov as a policeman in “Contact” and hasn’t joked since). Everyone is looking for this emerald egg, losing people, chasing dwarfs and looking at the bottomless cleavage of the actress Chernykh together with the viewer, because why not look? In addition, in the Testov antique shop there is a statue of “Odalisque” (also known as “Praskovya Tulupova”) from the masterpiece of Soviet antiquity “Love Formula” – a stone fool, as the then said living artist Peltzer. When the dissatisfied ask where the emerald, Indian, low-cut princesses in Moscow come from and where Lenin and the gypsies come from, there is only one answer: where does this marble mermaid come from, whose “immobility and pallor, and the silence to my soul they say so much about so many things.”
The film is an exorbitant two hours long with tail, and Borodyansky’s percussive lines are missing, because debuting screenwriters Kochetkova and Podrez are not Crisóstomo, no. Something like “In general, everyone died” or “We will get it from the future, not the first time” (I know, I know, this is Gorin, but Gorin died a long time ago, and Borodyansky, thank God, no).
To shorten everything for half an hour, saturate it with current expressions and at the end bring out the system of training a dramatic artist named after the comrade. Stanislavsky, which consists in: “what you play – live first in real life”, would be a good novel of anecdotes.
And that’s why something is missing.
Either a respected wardrobe, or Chaliapin with horseradish.
“KHITROVKA. THE SIGN OF FOUR”
2023.
Dir. Karen Shakhnazarov. Based on Conan Doyle and Gilyarovsky.
