In his native land: how "The Prophet" about Pushkin with Yura Borisov turned out to be

The wide national distribution of the movie "The Prophet. The Story of Alexander Pushkin" will begin only on February 14, but selected viewers had the opportunity to see the film first in St. Petersburg's Mikhailovsky Theatre already on February 3. The premiere created the feeling of an immersive performance: the film team arrived by carriage, at the entrance everyone was met by ushers in cylinders, real torches were burning, illuminating the darkness of the February evening. But everyone was interested in one thing: in vain or not the movie about Pushkin was so much awaited and waited for? According to the latest research of movie theater audiences (Wanta Group, specially for Izvestia), the waiting index for "The Prophet" is six times ahead of the nearest competitors. "Izvestia" evaluated the movie at the premiere and shares the first impressions.

Why it is difficult to make a movie about Pushkin

How to make Pushkin become closer? Indeed, "our everything", if you start to take apart his life, as if distances from us at a distance that can not be overcome. In too many ways we cannot put ourselves in his shoes. Super-elite education on the best course in the history of not only the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, but in general, perhaps, the whole of Russia. Belonging to an ancient boyar family, which becomes Pushkin's fix-it idea, sometimes comical, when he reminds others again and again how ancient his blood is. Friendship with members of the imperial family, which eventually developed into a parody of friendship in his relationship with Nicholas the First. Publicity, drama, historical works, reform of the Russian language, Russian poetry, Russian prose - and all this at the same time with the secular life, with intrigues, with how easy it was to coexist in the poet a great feeling for Goncharova with a passing remark that she is his one hundred and thirteenth.

Pushkin so much that he multiplies in the eyes, it is impossible to keep up with him. And the most important problem - his intelligence, paradoxical, universal, ruthless. Intelligence combined with genius gives birth to unearthly wisdom, even the mistakes of which (like thinking about the incongruity of genius and villainy) are perceived as a revelation. How to make a movie about Pushkin? How to write a screenplay about him, stage a play, compose music? Nothing, everything turns into a pathetic sham, blessed are those who managed to realize this and refrain from taking a step into the abyss.

The authors of the movie "The Prophet", fortunately, chose a different path. Not uncontroversial, at times irritating, but at the same time freeing them from solving the unsolvable problem of the immensity of Pushkin's personality. The new movie is a fantasy. If you will, it is a high school student's dream about Pushkin, where the poet appears to him with scraps of poems, with separate episodes of his biography, with rap-style zongs, because this high school student fell asleep just to some hip-hop hit, so that familiar lines sound in his slumber to the same melody. They say that Yuri Borisov on the set of Pushkin also dreamt of Pushkin. And the poem "The Prophet", which is given in the title (maybe not quite rightly), can also be considered a kind of dream. Let's assume that this is the key to the movie.

Understandable Pushkin

So still - how to make Pushkin closer? We'll have to give up something that takes too long to decipher, because the screen time for almost thirty years of the poet's life is allotted only two hours. We remove African blood, noble prejudices, Arina Rodionovna, the Caucasus, the Crimea, relations with his father, Freemasonry, meeting with Griboyedov's body, communication with Gogol, the war against the Turks, the Boldin Autumn - we remove as much as possible, because it's all long. We remove the intellect. We leave what will be understandable to a wide audience. That is: freedom-loving, loyalty to friends, amorousness, adventurism (although Pushkin is written out here as a young Pierre Bezukhov, who with his drinking buddies tied up a bear and a quartermaster and let him swim in the Moika).

Thus Pushkin becomes an eternal teenager, who from the school bench likes to impertinence his superiors, start scuffles, quarrel, fall in love and fight duels. And periodically he lights up, and he begins to produce poems, poems, dramas. Immediately in white - so it happens in dreams, only those who themselves tried to write something, see in nightmares tons of drafts, from which there is no way to crystallize something good. No, here Pushkin, as it is supposed to the prophet, only manages to write down after the inspiration dictating to him. And right after that the world lies at his feet, no matter how angry the officials-censors or even the monarchs may be.

These techniques work for the viewer. This Pushkin is understandable, he is his own, and if we take musicals, he is not too different in essence from Mels from "The Stilyags" or, albeit to a lesser extent, Mike from "Summer". The viewer, of course, resists out of habit. What are these vulgar orgies in red colors instead of St. Petersburg salons, he thinks? And why do the nobles do not address each other by their surnames, but call each other by their first names, although it was the surname that was the recognition of real intimacy? Why does the narrative suddenly begin to resemble Dovlatov's "Zapovednik" to a greater extent than the biography of a poet who actually lived, and lived very uneasily, by the way? What is this tennis court in Nikolai's palace, if this game was adored, as it seems, only by the next Nikolai - and many years later? And why does Natalia Goncharova behave like a Disney princess?

How Yura Borisov played Pushkin

And this is where the talent of Yura Borisov starts to work, whom the authors of the movie trusted so much that it seems as if they built the whole picture around him like a frame for an icon. It's as if Borisov is walking through the familiar episodes of Pushkin's life and checking where he suddenly resonates an emotion that he is absolutely familiar with. Here, for example, Pushkin comes to Nikolai to get acquainted, and the latter comes to him with such respect, such participation, such promises, finally, that how not to be seduced, not to forget the most evil anti-monarchist lines in the history of Russian literature? How not to believe that the new ruler will definitely correct all the bad things, because he will listen to the remarks of his brilliant advisers - Pushkin, Zhukovsky (the wonderful Ilya Lyubimov)?

Borisov resolves one of the most difficult conflicts in Pushkin's biography by bridging to our present, catching the (sadly) famous emotion of the temptation to be a mentor, an educator. To think that the naive authorities only want to be finally explained how to rule, and to be done so by "rulers of the mind," of course. The other emotion, frustration, is also understandable. And when Pushkin tells Benkendorf (a convincing Sergei Gilev) that two hundred-plus years have passed since "you can't pray for King Herod," we rewind another two hundred-plus years - and get to the point where the words of the fool spawn the same gamut of emotions.

Through Borisov, "frost and sun" and "stick and carrot" rhyme emotionally. Through Borisov, we understand how humiliating it is to get hit in the face with the title of "chamber junker" instead of everything you somehow dared to hope for. Through Borisov, we try to guess in what situations Pushkin might have felt what Onegin felt in his final explanation with Tatiana, and for what reason he suddenly finds himself in the place of the unfortunate Hermann with the lady of the peak mocking him.

It might seem that "The Prophet" requires a good knowledge of at least Pushkin's programmatic texts, but this is not quite so. Perhaps it is possible, on the contrary, to go to these texts through the emotion that Borisov has guessed. This is especially true of the last, pre-death part of the poet's biography. Here Borisov tries to go into quite sacred places - the last smile, the last word, the duel. It may be rough and even grotesque in some places, but it remains, it works, as if, like Okudzhava, a bird flies into the background of Pushkin, sanctifying what is happening before our eyes.

The poster of "The Prophet" now mentions that Yura Borisov is an Oscar nominee. And in the movie itself, Borisov fully justifies this status, turning the poet-thinker and poet-philosopher into a vital, joyful poet-hooligan, a friendly caricature that Pushkin himself would have enjoyed laughing at. And similar to one of the poet's best joke poems: "Love this and that, / Don't do this and that. / "I think it's clear. / Farewell, my beautiful." And the movie "The Prophet" tries to follow this precept as much as possible.