The protagonist of “Lucy” – programmer Senya (Danila Kozlovsky) – communicates better with inanimate objects than with people. At work, his boss Grisha (Ivan Makarevich) constantly makes fun of him for his “forever sour face”, at home Lena’s wife (the wonderful Daria Savelyeva) reproaches him for spinelessness, and vile teenagers bother him on the street. The brave Senya cannot resist. But there is a way out in the life of the protagonist – the clever pillar that Lucy creates, a self-learning intelligent mind that will listen and console.
The aforementioned conflict with the hooligans, with which Senya is cold in front of his family, turns into an unexpected tragedy: seeking revenge on the young criminal (Grigory Vernik), Senya seeks his father (Maxim Vitorgan), an influential lawmaker. ), who accidentally dies. While Senya unwittingly tries to cope with the crime, Nina (Kristina Asmus), the conservative woman of the deceased politician, enters his life beautifully and confidently, does not like people very much, but is filled with sympathy for Senya.
This is how a strange and combustible duo of heroes, thrown to the edge of life in the spirit of Bonnie and Clyde, is born, but with a significant upgrade – clever columnist Lucy (Daria Blokhina) flies with them into the abyss, unlike the main character, she is ruthless towards her criminals.
Director Ivan Tverdovsky (“Zoology”, “Conference”), familiar with the work of its author, enters the territory of the series for the first time, although he admits that he has long approached this format. For the most part, it didn’t work with the material – there was no original story that I wanted to embark on an 8-part journey.
The situation was changed by “Lucy”, written by screenwriter and producer Pyotr Vnukov (“Peace! Friendship! Gum!”, “Call DiCaprio!”) with Sergei Panasenkov. The story of a disillusioned hero rescued by a clever speaker became a good field for artistic maneuvers – and it turned out to be much deeper than the declared entry line.
“Lyusya” is a multi-level design with which Vnukov worked very well. Finally, this is a story about a cow going through a midlife crisis. The familial disorder of the hero is more likely not a cause, but a consequence: in addition to his wife, Senya has two daughters (which is typical, the youngest’s favorite toy is an ax), but he himself is like an older child, he can not. taking responsibility and making adult decisions. “I am chained by fear” will explain his cowardice in this way in his conversation with Grisha, but for a long time he will not be able to reflect on what has happened. After all, there are deadlines at work, a boring life at home, porridge in the head and something disgusting in the soul.
Anger results in the hero’s clumsy attempts to take revenge, but, as you know, they do not swing their fists after a fight. Moreover, this local vigilante witnesses a new atrocity: The bully abuser is insulted and poked by his own politician father, who is also one of the main lobbyists for domestic violence law.
This paradox of evil in nature runs through the plot as a red line: the characters often ponder overt and passive aggression, abuse of strangers and relatives, domestic cruelty that stirs the mood. Everything around him simultaneously radiates pain and intensifies it, because after a conflict with his father, Wernick’s hero lowers his anger even more – to a stranger and his father’s mistress, who soaks him with green paint.
Senya is also good – when there is no more strength to withstand, she angrily enters a smart column (she does not dare to confront living people), insults him with her last words. Thus emerges a sketch from a popular meme: the boss fell on the employee, the employee fell on his wife, the wife fell on the son, and he fell on the cat. Afraid of even being imprisoned, Senya fears most not the lack of freedom, but the threat of rape by the prisoners. This cycle of violence in the reality around us gradually comes to the forefront of the plot, and what started as a joke takes a serious tone.
A great value in this matter are not only the writers and the director, but also the actors of the main roles. On the one hand, attracting the super-successful Danila Kozlovsky to join your project is no easy task, but bringing an actor outside of his usual heroic role is even more difficult. Tverdovsky achieves this: in his own world, Danila’s character is weak, but not caricatured, lost, but always tries to do everything right, of course, outwardly handsome, but as if completely unaware of this hero.
Kristina Asmus, of whom Tverdovsky only speaks as a “strong dramatic actress”, is rightly known for her serious roles in theater too little and too much for the scandal with Metin. The protagonist in “Luce” is a fragile vessel, it shimmers beautifully in the sun, but it is hollow inside, because it is impossible to fill a spiritual void with what he is so zealously trying to grab from the world around him. Their unexpected tandem with Kozlovsky is a believable fantasy about heroes paralyzed from within, tired of hiding from life.
However, in addition to the strong acting work, the series did not escape the main scourge of domestic projects, the weak work of female characters. Although Nina has dramatic volume thanks to Asmus, she’s simply a held woman: without any comprehensible activity, background, and personal history outside of the men’s world. Lena is an indestructible cliché about a wife who constantly nags her husband, suspects him of cheating, and humiliates her in front of her children. We learn from the first minutes who and where Senya works, and that the heroine Daria Savelyeva has some kind of work, only in the third series. The psychotherapist performed by Anna Slyu is a walking anecdote about information gypsies and bloggers in one bottle – instead of a clear therapy, she offers the hero a kind of muddy practice with his karma work. And this hero has nothing but the belt.
So once again, not living women – self-sufficient, interesting, different – male authors’ fantasies about them are revealed. It’s also distorted and stereotypical.
Speaking of other features of the series, it is impossible not to remember the Spike Jones movie Her, where Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with artificial intelligence. While the comparison of both projects is mundane, their similarities in time context seem interesting.
The hero of Phoenix is a solitary resident of the metropolis who makes a living by writing beautiful love letters for others. Kozlovsky’s hero cannot do this – it is enough only to teach others, but not enough to follow his own principles.
In “O,” the smart speaker, gaining autonomy, left the protagonist and reminded him that it would be better to live. In Luce, the smart speaker is only trying to capture Senya’s life as much as possible, although it is clear in advance that the moral of the story is the same – a person should not be alone, not an island, but intimacy. sought only among other people. When Spike Jones premiered in 2013, this plot seemed to herald that man would surely defeat all artificial. The current “Lucy”, which came to the screens almost ten years later, seems to deprive us of this confidence. And this is very scary.