"Northern Tale": Pavla Stratulat's debut "Agnia" hits screens

The unpreparedness for long-distance running in art is felt from the first works by many. Here on the screens is one of the typical debuts – "Agnia" by Pavla Stratulat. In the annotations it was defined as a "northern fairy tale". In a certain kingdom, a certain state in an icy town lives and catches fish in an ice hole still young, by the look of it pretty Agnia. At home her son defrosts a frozen fish near the heater – in the room there is a chill: the boiler room has collapsed, the village is freezing. The population walks with a poster: "Save us! We are freezing!" There is even talk of a hunger strike in protest.

Meanwhile, the mayor Boris, as if mocking the people, gives his fellow countrymen a swimming pool with a dolphin on the wall instead of heating. Those accustomed to social cinema will expect an exposure of bureaucratic callousness, but the mayor Boris is played by the actor Sergei Gilev with such an attentive, sympathetic look that you don’t believe in the heartlessness of his character. And the main heroine, Agniya, is not simple: in this role, an actress with an even more intelligent face, Yevgeniya Gromova, and it is even harder to believe that this Agniya is the best stove-maker in the area.

The authors of new films often do not know what they are making their films about and why, what they want to tell them

If you show a film with such a strange casting to a foreigner, he will not understand what kind of life it is from – Icelandic? Antarctic? Martian? Its environment is snow-covered roads, desert landscapes, ice with ice holes, from the flora – frozen taiga, from the fauna – elk antlers sticking out in the distance, from the housing – a frosted house where miraculously people still live. But there is also the aforementioned swimming pool, not to mention the mayor's villa – we have seen such in films about well-fed Sweden: all glass, whiteness, geometry and sterility, it smells of millions in old prices.

Those accustomed to social cinema will be wary: now they will expose the thief-mayor. But this is a fairy tale, and it is about Agnia.

Agniya is haunted by misfortunes. Here is her son who fell out of a window and limps on a crutch. Here is a guy with the appearance of the actor Mikhail Troynik and the witty saying "Man is a fish to man" who pursues her with timid but persistent love, and Agniya cuts him off: "Are you stupid?" And here is her home that burned down, and there is no hope of finding a new one.

In fact, this Agnia herself will scare away any hope. Evgenia Gromova is entrusted with the role of an embittered creature, always looking askance, not smiling, shaving off anyone who dares to look at her sympathetically. And all the time she tries to put a dirty trick on someone. "Are you sure you're a woman?" – someone will reasonably ask her. What will happen in dissonance with the refined intelligent appearance – it is clear how the actress tries to play something inorganic to her and how she suffers a fiasco: the type is not right. In addition, she clearly does not know herself who her Agnia is – an intriguer? an adventurer? a people's avenger? a treacherous homewrecker?

The plot of the film, despite its apparent simplicity, is so complicated that it is difficult to figure it out right away. Stove-maker Agniya undertakes to build a stove with tiles for Mayor Boris. However, for some reason, in a flimsy hut that does not harmonize well with the billionaire's estate. He carries bricks, mixes mortar, works hard, but for some reason he will build a self-exploding monster without tiles. And although he feels social hatred towards the mayor, he hopes for his male attention – to solve the housing issue or is this serious, will remain a secret of the author of the film. And the mayor immediately noticed her. Of course, he has a beautiful wife, but he has a formal relationship with her. He invited the woman who had burned down to live in his mansion, and a complex relationship of enmity-friendship-repulsion-attraction began there. The misfortunes of the freezing villagers are forgotten, the mayor is busy – teaching his daughter to shoot an elk, kneading clay on his bare feet in dangerous proximity to stove-maker Agniya. Finally, he has an election, which he wins – the population in kokoshniks sings "Burn, burn brightly, so that it doesn't go out!" All this will inevitably lead to Agnia taking off her armyak, exposing her breasts and being either embraced or rejected by the mayor. But multi-story buildings will immediately rise around her, and the mayor will hand over the keys to the apartments to expectant mothers. Whether this mass pregnancy was the result of that very exposing of breasts will also remain unclear.

In the end, it is unclear how to treat a mayor who builds a swimming pool but cannot warm up a freezing village. And should we understand metaphorically the scene where there is no furniture in the newly built apartment, but the TV is already broadcasting. And what did the author want to say by making the heroine laugh for the first time in the finale. There is no script or direction in the film in the sense that the author does not see the forest for the trees, works out episodes without keeping the whole in mind, and, it seems, does not know what and why he is making his film, what he wants to tell the public.

The film's merits include its leitmotif: Denis Antonov wrote a charming, almost jumping tune. However, the technical quality of the dialogue dubbing is catastrophic: in order to understand the actors' muttering, the film would have needed Russian subtitles. The critics who saw allusions to the films of Lanthimos, Kore-eda, Bong Joon-ho, Castellano and Pushkin's fairy tales here are to be envied: they have a vivid imagination.