“Actresses” are finally shown in their entirety – 10 episodes of 30 minutes each, not the usual format for a miniseries, but the plot is not very ordinary either.
As can be seen from the movie about the series, experienced TV producer Valery Todorovsky believed in the talent of screenwriter Paulina Andreeva and asked about it after watching the TV series “Psych”, which Fyodor Bondarchuk shot according to the script of his wife. to write something else. About something he knows. Also, Todorovsky knew actress Paulina Andreeva since the filming of The Thaw: in this series, a student of the Moscow Art Theater School played a singer, and by the way she herself sang, remember: “I thought it was spring. , but it’s a thaw …” .
A highly successful career and close partnerships with all the leading theater directors – they played together with Mashkov in the play “Number 13” and with Khabensky in the series “Method” – helped to make many unforgettable impressions. Since then, Andreeva has become a famous actress, played many roles in films and the Art Theater, married Fyodor Bondarchuk, tried to become a director and became a screenwriter. It should be said right away that Paulina has an extraordinary ability to hear time through language: she accurately captures phrases, turns and words, which allows you to create an image of time.
The new script turned out to be about modern young actors – theater and cinema. The plot is both familiar to Paulina and close to Todorovsky, and Bondarchuk himself was tempted to shoot the series. Filming began in the summer of 2022.
A strong theatrical emphasis is provided by associating all the characters with a particular Main Theater of the country and filming taking place behind the scenes, backstage and foyer of the Moscow Art Theatre. The action is divided into three parts. First, start 2014, second from 2017 to 2019, and finally third, end of pandemic, 2020. True covid self-isolation is the trigger for its climax: stress and lack of work are so hard for nervous and emotional heroes that relationships explode, undercover claims arise and true desires openly declare themselves.
Three actresses, to whom the main attention of the authors is directed: the twitching beauty Polina, who is “already over forty” (Svetlana Khodchenkova), Alena (Elena Nikolaeva) fighting for the last chance, and the young, insecure Oksana (Polina Pushkaruk) enter new professional and personal relationships for yourself. They are already experiencing the limitations of isolation beyond the threshold of a tantrum, and its end will coincide with the exposure of all nerve nodes.
Paulina Andreeva began to write her script as sketches – and, in essence, they remained scenes from the life of Moscow artists of a certain generation. As Fyodor Bondarchuk admits: “We shoot about us, all these stories give me a terrible reaction as a professional” and the actors repeat it. All the dialogues are really recognizable and can be heard very accurately. However, this was no longer seen through the eyes of a screenwriter, but through the eyes of the director and producers. It was Valery Todorovsky who came up with the idea to add songs and dances to the series, staged by the same people as “Stilyagi” and “Thaw”, so that the theatrical world becomes brighter and more festive. Pictorial tasks were also important to Bondarchuk – he likes to experiment with light, mood and certain pictorialism. All this is interesting, but has nothing to do with the core of the show.
What do you think is important in this study?
History about artists, theater and cinema often appears in culture. That in his plays, including Hamlet, with the meme “All the world is a theater …”, Shakespeare had scenes with actors, that Ostrovsky wrote several plays entirely about the theater. Yes, and Chekhov composed the famous “The Seagull” about actors and writers, although he was married to an actress. And how Bulgakov showed us this magical theater both in the Theater Novel and in the play about Molière! Not to mention Somerset Maugham, whose novel The Theater started the myth of the actor as an impersonal person. Each stage of world culture presented its own concept of sacred myth, the realm of illusions, whose incarnation was the actor, soul, body, thoughts and other substances.
There is a certain angle in the picture Andreeva wrote. In the series, the world is shown from the point of view of the three actresses. Everyone feels that the desired role, behind which is success, self-actualization, real life, is moving away from him. None of them live in the reality given to him. There’s a hateful routine going around – an infuriating husband, an annoying child hindering his career, friends and girlfriends ready to betray and trap, relatives intolerable in domestic worries. All of them are rivals in the struggle for success. All friendships and loves are ready to end because of betrayal.
But if you try to understand what all the characters-players want, it turns out that they all need one thing – so that they are not forgotten.
Call for auditions, distribution of roles in the theater, interviews with any publication – this is a test of one’s own relevance. It’s not a greedy role – but anyone, I wish they took it. It’s not some sort of sacred duty, but to go on stage for quite some time so as not to stay in the crowd. Down with all the old masks, no creative duty, special social significance, debt to the arts, one thing – don’t forget me, don’t let me fall out of the clip, let me be called again before the expiration date. Such is the fate of an actor in an age of the perishable reputation of the mass media.
The heroes of the “actresses”, the actresses themselves, their husbands and lovers are lost, not because they did not materialize in the profession. It is impossible to notice in the profession that we see on the screen, and the point is not to waste nervous energy. That is, energy is wasted, mental strength is always exhausted, there is nothing and nowhere to fill them, because the goal of desires can never be achieved. No matter how successful you are, you can be forgotten tomorrow. Five minutes of fame fades quickly, time flies, you are not part of a great common cause, today you are a light-led unit, a moth, but not tomorrow.
Everything is temporary, everything is not eternal, nothing can fill the void. Polina tries to believe, sings in the church choir, decorates her house with icons, but instantly gives up everything, only the possibility of getting the role again appears. Alena imitates a family – here is her son, here is a man in love, but all this is decoration, and most importantly – attention to the sequence in which she is so devoid of endless and constant arguments. Oksana plays the role of a grumpy and hysterical wife in her kitchen in front of her husband, mother-in-law, and mother, as not much is happening, until the real success looms ahead – a long shot to release, but never shown in the movie.
The older generation develops a separate theme: a tragicomic love triangle led by the main director (Igor Zolotovitsky), his mistress, the theater director (Lolita Milyavskaya) and the director’s wife (Natalya Surkova). These are people who are not directly on the agenda, but who are influential and at the same time addicted. The point in this draft game is to get between the kings, take the helm, and then hold it in your teeth for as long as you can.
I must say that the series is not at all accusatory in terms of satire, the action fluctuates from scene to scene, without drawing conclusions and imposing evaluations. All beautiful, just unfortunate. Everyone wants sympathy, no one deserves it, but all human beings feel sorry for them, they really suffer.
They have nothing to play for a long time, neither Brecht, nor Vampilov, nor trouble-free “Lev Gurych Sinichkin” advertising videos and visual aggression will not be able to save players of the era from emptiness and fear. I do not know how the young actress Paulina Andreeva, who tried herself in the field of screenplay, felt about it.
His own story could have been the subject of a much more traditional series with a much-acclaimed happy ending. But no, he heard the hum of time and he showed it in all sincerity. It was the old comrades who graced the rout of an entire generation with flamboyant fixtures, dances, and beautifully shot camera angles, and packed it into ten short episodes that still didn’t contain the final result. Bondarchuk feels the need to finish the unsaid, so he dreams of making a sequel: “Even if it’s ten years from now, I’ll definitely be making a second season of Actress.”
It is doubtful whether this sequel will be needed by someone in a decade. But only three points seem possible today.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.