“A story that will shatter viewers’ perceptions of the actors’ lives and let them enter their real lives with their fears, desires and goals.” This is how the TV series “Actresses”, shot by Fyodor Bondarchuk and written by Paulina Andreeva (the second project after “Psycho” with Konstantin Bogomolov), is described in the press releases. Of course, “Actresses” do not do such a thing, and almost no one had illusions about people of this profession: almost everyone dreams of fame, few are lucky, that’s the whole story. The series only routinely confirms these obvious predictions.
The “Actresses” split into three acts (it may be tempting to joke here that Andreeva learns something about the structure of the second series, but we won’t) and it makes a somewhat depressing impression, even covering the segment from 2014 to 2020: years go and the lives of these people do not change globally. Someone makes a loud comeback and restarts their career, for someone that career is lost and for someone it doesn’t really start. But there is no improvement in all this: they go to auditions, the dramatic knots tied together getting lost in the ringing off-screen void.
That’s not a problem in itself, this kind of biographical stuff that really doesn’t go anywhere, has an audience (take, for example, Sam Mendes’ recent “Empire of Light”, which peeps at the life of a smoldering cinema in England). 80s). The downside to “Actresses” is that the show doesn’t quite do justice to its name. Apparently she was calling herself the loader—climb to the back, but no: a feminist in the title, the show decides to start with a 37-minute story about the life of actor Hera. (Aleksi Makarov)as it soon turned out, that the main series are the protagonists of the entire series Polina, Alena and Oksana (They are played by Svetlana Khodchenkova, Elena Nikolaeva and Polina Pushkaruk.) appears at first in the form of secondary characters.
It doesn’t stop there: In the same first episode, Hera leaves the scene, so to speak, forever, but she holds the ghost of “Actresses” hostage for a long time, forcing her to serve as history’s center of gravity. And they immediately find themselves a few more – pretty stupid, I must say – men (Sergey Gilev and Pavel Popov)continues to shift the focus away from the actresses themselves.
With the text of Paulina Andreeva it is difficult to tell what she thought of the audience. If “actresses” were conceived as an expression of a certain desperation for the position of women (even in such a seemingly limitless profession), if they were conceived as an expression of their ubiquitous fate tearing their backs forever in an effort to achieve at least something in a world. that even the most mediocre and boring men are given almost exactly like that, then probably the show copes with this task and, accordingly, Andreev should be warmly praised. And her husband Bondarchuk (this is already optional) shaking hands in support of the right-wing feminist cause, especially since the songs of Alla Pugacheva, Maya Kristalinskaya, Bi- are still associated with virtuoso nostalgia for the youth of the clip-maker here. 2, The Greatest Prime Number ”, Sirotkin and other decent people.
The trick is that Actresses don’t seem to want to focus on issues of sexism and gender discrimination in Russian cinema and theatre. There is even a kind of romantic breeze blowing from the show, on the contrary, so they say, we have a very extravagant life, but how wonderful it is with its randomness. So beauty, or rather absolute ugliness, apparently, is still in the eye of the beholder. Speaking in the local language: enough, you can go, we will call you back.