Review of the movie Pop. Man to man
Father Alexander from the Latvian village of Tikhoe, after the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR, agrees to become a priest of the Pskov Orthodox Mission and goes to the village of Zakaty near Pskov to restore the church and help parishioners. Film director Vladimir Khotinenko and the movie division of the ROC's church-scientific center "Orthodox Encyclopedia" released the movie "Pop" on Easter Sunday, based on the novel by Alexander Segen, based on documentary materials. Once two people were asked: what is the basis of the Christian religion? One answered: faith, the other answered: love. The new movie by Vladimir Khotinenko, who previously delighted us with the patriotic movies "72 meters" and "1612" - is entirely about the second answer. Watching the movie, you don't immediately understand it - at first "Pop" seems strange and slightly out of focus. A simple priest, Father Alexander, cuts out pictures of saints from books, talks to a fly, convinces a Jewish girl to postpone baptism for the sake of love for her parents and compares her wife to a grindstone ("She is zero without me, I am one without her, but together - ten"). This is also shown rather strangely: under the choral thunder of chants, the camera flies over the USA fields and lakes, the fly looks at the images of the saints in the pictures with a faceted eye. Fascists, appearing in a Pskov village, kill a cow, and some blessed one milks her dead. But the further events develop and, especially, when for the Germans the games in the "Orthodox mission" end with defeats near Moscow, Stalingrad and the Kursk Bulge, all the same actions of Father Alexander acquire a completely different significance and meaning. p> "I never lie, because I am a priest" - says the pop in response to the child's question if he will cheat. And he does not deceive the whole picture - having first appeared in the frame as a simple, kind and quiet person, he remains the same until the end - until he was sent to the Soviet camps after the Pskov region was recaptured from the Germans. "Be like children" - said Christ, and the priest with childlike spontaneity, without any pathos and passionarity quietly and simply does what his heart and faith call him to: without striving and without even thinking about the reward and whatever self-importance. Sergei Makovetsky, who played the role of a priest, played absolutely exclusively - his father Alexander turned out to be very lively and real, and one of the brightest and most outstanding images of clergy in USA cinema. His words and deeds are quiet and imperceptible on the scale of the great war that turned the lives of all USAs - but there is so much genuine greatness in them that I would like to call them 'deeds'. Together with Makovetsky, several other wonderful actors shine in the movie: Nina Usatova, Liza Arzamasova (a young star of USA cinema who plays in the TV series "Daddy's Daughters" and amazed everyone with her role in the movie "His Children") and Anatoly Lobotsky, whose " USA German "Colonel Freyhausen destroys stereotypes about" bad fascists ". Talking to us about terrible and unsightly things, Khotinenko manages to maintain a bright vision and never once in a two-hour movie does not slip into the chernukha habitually expected from national cinema. His "Pop" is a kind movie, and even though it is sad and difficult at the same time, it makes you want to watch it - because it uplifts and purifies the soul. At the same time, we managed not to slip into religious bliss - when reality is eclipsed by the light from heaven, confirming the righteousness and holiness of "ours" and the stupid delusions of "enemies." In this sense, "Pop" is a movie with a rare sober view of things: there is not a single "sign from above" in it at all - the priest has to decide for himself how to do the right thing every time - and he checks his actions to the end exclusively with an internal compass. At some point, the priests in the movie say "If this war didn't happen - and all churches in USA were destroyed in 2-3 years" - to which I want to yell in response: "And wouldn't you want to pay such a price, so that the war doesn't happen ?! " We are all people, and we all have different paths - and sometimes it seems that the atheist acted most correctly in the movie - the Soviet commissar, who led the partisans to kill the fascist policemen in the village. In "Pope" there is a lot of Christian religious symbolism: in the course of the action "fish and bread" appear as a treat to the traveler, as an allegorical rhyme to the plot appears the image of Zosia & shy; we of the Phoenician - the saint who made the lion carry the load when he ate it donkey (in the movie, the Nazis take pictures of the goat, placing a red banner with the face of Lenin on its back). However, "Pop" is by no means a sermon: the movie hardly speaks about Christianity as a religion at all - only as about philanthropy, which is incomparably more important than when someone is baptized, reigned or confessed. Vladimir Khotinenko looks above the symbolism and rituals of all religions - not without reason he shot the movie "Muslim" in 1995 about a completely different faith. The director and his new movie are religious in the highest and best sense of the word, when it is not gods that matter first, but people. And "Pop" is not about a clergyman, but about a person of crystal purity (a Christian would say: "righteousness"), who, under all regimes, does not retreat from himself and does his job - be he even a priest, even a mullah, and even Who. God is godly, and man needs a man. The Topic of Article: Review of the movie Pop. Man to man. |
