The drawn-out crisis of the Ukrainian filmmaking industry increasingly often compels domestic producers to make do with compromises. Strange as it may sound here, a film director must make movies, possibly big-time productions. The more the better. Yet far from all can afford this to cover the historical, cultural, and artistic aspects, all in one picture. Ambitions are ample and funds scarce.
The very notion of big-time cinema, traditionally meaning a full- length motion picture using celluloid and meant for public showing at movie theaters, currently more and more often extends to strange hybrids, owing to financial problems making it impossible to observe set technological standards. Graphic evidence is found in Vladimir Savelyev’s production, The Mystery of Genghis Khan (the script, written by him and Ivan Drach, is based on the poem “The Mystery Genghis Khan Took Away with Him” by Kazakh folk poet Mukhtar Shakhanov), premiered at the Cinematographers’ Home in Kyiv two weeks ago.
In fact, the only big-time thing about it was the big screen displaying a big picture of the authors’ longing for the big-time cinema style and struggling to implement it using pavilion setting and video techniques. Indeed, the combination produces an overwhelming effect of utter wretchedness. Its overstated theatricality, superfluous scenery (presumably Genghis Khan’s tent interior), static staging, meaningful and statuary postures, stilted declaratory lines, starry skies looking very much like a planetarium imitation, only make things worse.
It is difficult to say why the authors chose Genghis Khan. All things considered, their longing for the big-time cinema must have combined with another piece of nostalgia recently dominating a considerable part of the creative intelligentsia: tyrannoclasm. Yet this does not explain the choice of the treacherous and bloodthirsty Genghis Khan as the object of historical vengeance. Well, perhaps this is the Mystery of the video parable, for nothing other can be discovered.
Traditionally for our latter-day big-time historical movie genre, this production stars Bohdan Stupka. His performance is powerful, colorful, inventive, and convincing. In fact, the picture’s concept relies on the actor’s indefatigably diversified and expressive mimicry.
The film starts with a rather long text about Genghis Khan belonging to the Temujin clan sired, according to legend, by a wolf. And the actor tried – quite effectively, it should be noted – to materialize and make concrete the tyrant’s wolfish nature. In doing so, Bohdan Stupka went far ahead of the film director with his banal special effects, now and then superimposing the actor’s face with the wolf’s mug. With a fanatical zeal the actor used all his arsenal of facial muscular movements to convey the dying despot’s bloodthirsty beastliness. I truly envy future specialists in dramatic arts using this film as a priceless and pointless schooling aid to have an insight in the great actor’s creative legacy. In a word, the new production is likely to premiere on the home screens before long, but is not likely as a moneymaker.
Actually, few other films if any can count on moneymaking status. This must have convinced the established movie-maker Vyacheslav Krishtofovych to produce on the television series, “Under the Roofs of the Big City,” that premiered on the Inter channel last week. This means that the big-time cinema can also be interpreted as lasting for weeks. The trend appeared on the crest of the wave of the so-called new Russian television series. Unlike the primitive daytime soaps, they are made as a technological chain, marked by good style and turning out quality products. In this sense, it is another way to materialize that longing for the tempestuous filmmaking process. True, domestic analogies of the popular series “ Birthday of Bourgeois” tend to be chamber-like in terms of style, apparently lacking in action and epic, compared, say, to Aleksandr Mitta’s ever so popular “Romance of the Taiga.”
The new urban romance, its plot teeming with diverse intrigues, focuses on the life story of a very big family living in Kyiv, judging by all indications. However, it stars Moscow actors, not current ones but for the most part old familiar faces: Yekaterina Vasilyeva, Larissa Udovichenko, and Oleg Basilashvili as the lecherous old twins. Fortunately, the cast includes many talented, famous and not so famous, young and not so young Kyiv actors. The big-time cinema is represented by names and faces only. The rest is typical television series, and it is too early to pass judgment as it is still on.
Finally, a very unexpected niche filled by movie-makers barred from big budgets. Rock videos appear one after the next, each claming real cinema status, with good plots and instantly identifiable popular casts. Romantic stories about Natalia Mohilevska and Dmytro Gordon, Tayisiya Povaliy and an anonymous (pity!) yet sexually very symbolic handsome young man, plus Tatiana Nedelskaya’s whole White Guard Company. I must say that everybody is taking a risk here: the singers playing dramatic parts with emphasized dramatization and the actors doing their supporting roles with utmost enthusiasm, and directors showing a lot of creative ambition coupled with unpretentious taste. But he that takes no risks, neither shall he make anything remotely like big-time cinema. We all crave something big and real, the more the better. Without it everything is such a big bore!
