The main character Andrei (Pavel Derevyanko) is a cynical and greedy bank employee. He is stingy not only for giving credit, but also for the manifestation of human emotions. He has a failed marriage in his suitcase, a pretty cool relationship with his mother, shrewd financial scams with friends, and a string of speed dates via Tinder – life isn’t a fairy tale, but Andrei somehow copes. While the hero himself obediently pulls this strap, fate shuffles the cards and gives him an unexpected trump card. After the next birthday, Andrei wakes up the day before, and with each new awakening the countdown goes in the opposite direction – Derevyanko’s character is persistently drawn to the past.
The synopsis hints at a parallel with the memorized Groundhog Day, but when viewed, it turns out to have much less in common with Samsara’s comedy Bill Murray than with the Strugatsky brothers’ fantasy story “Monday Begins Saturday.” Because this is not the story of a hero stuck where he is, but of a man who lives his own life upside down.
Andrey reflects on the work of the Strugatskys – the idea of countermovement (moving in the opposite direction in time) offered by the Soviet classics is almost the only clue a confused character can do and try to catch. There is also the mysterious Nadia (Kristina Asmus) – either a girl or a visionary. As Andrey races around Peter to find a way out of this sudden loop of time, Nadia will make her way as if out of nowhere, hoping to point the way. But Andrei is blind and deaf to the complex metaphors of life, does not believe in mysticism, and for too long considers his newfound experience a quality joke of his friends: wow, how cunningly they played this game, and he almost believed it.
But with each new day and the calendar turning in the wrong direction on the mobile phone’s screen saver, gradually reassuring the hero that he cannot understand what the usual logic is. A trip to the doctor proves that he is not dead and that it is not a terrible torment in some kind of uncertainty, that he does not have any serious diseases and brain tumors that affect his perception of the world, and that no one is trying to play him. . On the contrary, he seems to be telling everyone a not-so-funny and fraudulent anecdote.
Of course, Andrei himself does not laugh either, but Nadina’s hint that it is possible to escape from the magical time loop only if the mistakes of the past are corrected are still unheeded. It is difficult for a hero whose thinking ability has atrophied to see this causal relationship. Simply put, Andrei sincerely believes that he had no faults in the past. This position strengthens his self-defense mechanism, but isolates him from the world by throwing him further back in time: tell anyone what happened, no one will believe it.
Moreover, the protagonist’s inner circle is highly dubious in terms of support: the few women with whom he can establish decent human relations (his ex-wife Katya, played by Anna Starshenbaum, and his mother, played by Olga Lapshina), remain distant for years, and everything else lingers neither in his bed nor in his life. Close friends are more preoccupied with their own problems and how honest their friendship is – a question the countdown will also test.
At work, things are even worse: Andrey’s frivolous attitude towards his job turns into serious problems with his superiors. His boss, in the person of former Comedy Club resident Viktor Vasilyev, appears to be a spiritual brother to Kevin Spacey’s character in Horrible Bosses, if not a close relative – a man whose obedience is impossible to work with, and any verbal contact burns with psychological abuse.
The only “vent” is her colleague Marina (Olga Sutulova), a woman with an unstable personal life and an insufficiently studied victim syndrome from the Karpman triangle. However, the role of the heroine in the fate of the hero, as well as other female characters in “Samsara”, unfortunately, is reduced only to filling the gap in the gaps in the imperfect life of Andrey.
In general, if a colleague is secretly in love and unhappy, his quality of life is determined by the degree of reciprocity received in response from a man for any reason only; if the hero is a gift from friends, be sure to buy a rubber doll from the sex shop; if it’s the secretary, then of course she’s giving verbal caresses to the boss; and if the hero is a guide, then he is not as mysterious as himself on the board and immediately abandons personal matters to solve the hero’s problems. And even Andrei’s ex-wife does not have a convincing, autonomous plot separate from him.
This dubious look on the characters presented, whose personal spectrum ranges from cartoon villainy to puppet submissive, is reflected in the story itself. The pilot of the exhibition was shot separately by Sergey Korotaev, and then the project was taken by Maria Agranovich, it seems too disorganized and shaky to match the inner state of the heroine. Apparently not an artistic design, but a lack of montage by the author.
The change of the director did not fundamentally change the situation: there are many handsome Peters in the frame, he even stands above the representative of Basta’s “Samsara” (there are so many songs in the series that, apparently, the project is additional promotion for the work of a rapper), but the sharpness and dynamics of the script are not enough .
In the story of the Strugatskys, one of the characters said: “Every person is a magician in his soul, but he becomes a magician only when he begins to think less about himself and more about others, when it becomes more interesting to him. Work rather than have fun in the old sense of the word.” And the mention of writers left in the script, undisguised by the writers, predicts a further development of the plot and Andrei’s ordeals – he will break this vicious circle as soon as he rethinks his life and the people living in it.
The only sad thing is that it takes a circuitous path to this enlightenment: not through the thorns of fate, but through the intricate paths of a clumsy script from so many disparate pieces. It’s a mystical thriller, a philosophical parable, and even a tense detective story with an investigation. Separately, it looks good, but just like on Tinder, unfortunately it does not match.