Self-love manifesto. Review of ”Let's Get Divorced!”
The morning at the gynecologist Masha (Anna Mikhalkova) was clearly not working out. She is in a hurry to an important event - the Merry Starts family relay race, for which she had to quit her job, and in parallel with her knowledge of the matter, she consults a colleague on the phone. At the entrance to the swimming pool, where the competition takes place, there is a banner with the meaningful inscription "Depth of Possibilities". The problem immediately emerges: Masha forgot the most important thing - a swimsuit. “It's good that at least she's wearing a single-color underwear,” she consoles herself and walks to the pool, where two children and her disgruntled husband Misha (Anton Filipenko) are already waiting for her. Masha finds out that her husband has been dissatisfied for a long time only in the evening, when she accidentally sees on his phone a message from his mistress, recorded in contacts as “Fitness”.Masha works several jobs to pay off a loan for a house in the countryside, and hardly sees her children. Misha always dealt with them: he prepared food, took him to kindergarten, read a fairy tale at night. After he leaves for a sports mistress, Masha has to do everything herself. And it turns out pretty badly for her. He will somehow dress the children, then he will completely forget to take them out of the garden. Fortunately, the local district police officer Fyodor (Fyodor Lavrov), although he looks stern, is ready to meet halfway, hush up the matter and even console in a sad moment, besides, there is a bottle of alcohol in the chest of drawers in case. At first Masha will lament: “The most important thing is that I myself gave him a subscription to the fitness room!”. And he will try to return Misha: in despair he will write down a hundred voice messages and even go to a fortune teller ... And then he will try to forget him and start life anew.  The focus of Anna Parmas's debut film seems to be one of the most hackneyed topics - adultery. One might think that in the USA version it would refer to the archetypal Euripides tragedy about Medea and Theseus, which cannot but lead to disaster. However, Parmas rethinks the already boring story of adultery and makes a film about an ordinary woman. She has no skeletons in the closet, like the heroine Mikhalkova in the TV series "An Ordinary Woman" by Boris Khlebnikov and Natalia Meshchaninova. Masha doesn't need to take revenge, like Medea, or become fatal: she just needs to accept and love herself. Therefore, it is not surprising that "Let's get divorced!" ordinary viewers liked it so much: at “Kinotavr” the picture received the audience's sympathy prize. This award is the most appropriate and logical for a Parmas film.  Parmas became truly famous thanks to her work on the videos of the Leningrad group, whose song “The Stars Are Shining” is played in one of the iconic scenes “Let's Get Divorced!”. It was she who shot the most viral videos: "Healthy lifestyle", "Ecstasy", "In St. Petersburg - drink" and, of course, "Exhibit". Largely thanks to them, even those who had never heard of Sergei Shnurov began to follow the "Leningrad". So portraying comic situations and funny women Parmas on the screen is no stranger. The ironic intonation is the main distinguishing feature of her style. It is enough to revise the sensational clips or recall films created in a creative duet with Avdotya Smirnova: for example, "2 days" or "Cococo". Parmas's debut painting "Let's Get a Divorce!" competently complements the existing puzzle and takes the newly-made director to a new level.  Despite the fact that "Let's get divorced!" takes the viewer into a conventional cinematic reality, where the police can be good fairies, and the husband can be a dowser looking underground for water sources in almost magical ways, the film describes a fairly true story and illustrates the life experience of an ordinary woman. In Parmas, the heroine is making plans for the return of her husband, of course, because she loves him, but partly because there is a stereotype in her mind: you can only be happy and be happy when you are in a relationship. Here Masha will turn to a fortune teller in order to bewitch her husband again, then she will hasten to arrange her personal life in order to feel her attractiveness. But it soon becomes clear that the recipe for happiness lies in harmonious self-love. Only after knowing this unconditional feeling can the depth of possibilities really open.< You do not try to please and please others, because you accept yourself for who you are, enjoy your freedom and see your inner strength, confidence. Therefore, the sentence "Let's get divorced!" sounds not like a cry of despair, but rather like a protest manifesto against stereotypes about the hard lot of single mothers and total dislike for oneself. The film's message is especially protesting and daring in contrast to the well-known program “Let's Get Married!”, Which no less expresses the USA national idea. Now is the time to rethink it. The Topic of Article: Self-love manifesto. Review of ”Let's Get Divorced!”. |
