Competition
Dir. Nikolay Khomeriki

Once upon a time lived a young man named Kostya – employee of subway, with apartment, mother, girlfriend, and other standard features of normal life. One day Kostya went to see doctor to make EKG, which resulted in doctors telling him that he’s almost perfectly healthy, except for the fact that he has some illness of the heart, with which he could die any day – not necessarily that he would, but still. Kostya then drank some vodka in karaoke-bar and went on to live what’s left of his life – maybe a day, maybe a year, or maybe even hundred years – but still, his pictured in black and white life, lived by the uniform buzz of the outside world.

It may seem like the EKG divides Kostya’s life into two parts, as it usually goes – before and after, but this is not completely true: the scene in a hospital is the opening scene of the film, so there is formally no “before”, which only stays implied somewhere, beyond the screen space – just like the fact that this “before” is not so different from “now”. Using this slide of dramaturgy, the authors of the film turn the story told from the plot about how a man’s life’s changing after some fateful new, into a story about how impossible it is to really change it. If, if one would go a little more further, - about how fatal can a pronounced word turn out to be. The unsophisticated statement that every given person – despite his own capacities, talents or ambitions – can stop existing any minute, being articulated and properly addressed, has the effect of gardening equipment with which one is being heat on the head – no doubt it is a little awkward, but still effective.

To make the point more obvious the main protagonist of the film is chosen among those, not even average, but minimally tending for any kind of existential self consciousness. So Kostya embarks on his “free voyage” more intuitively than consciously. The material of abstract categories is developed on a level of everyday life. But even on this level any labors not to be a “clock orange” disappear. Every exit beyond the bounds of system turns out to be some absurdity.

In the process of this Odyssey Kostya discovers the unpleasant truth about life being the sequence of physiological actions, which he lived, but had never felt or seen. However, it turns out that – just like in the case of gardening equipment, it is hard to answer something reasonably to this statement. Sure, one can always refuse to see his heart as an organ of human body and find somewhere its traditional poetic meaning. But it can easily lead to even more tragic repercussions – what if you finally find this poetic meaning, but instead of a symbol or a metaphor there will turn up a paper valentines card?

Olga Artemieva