Yuriy Bykov
The major

A remote Russian province of the empire of evil. Snow and ice. In a world where nothing seems to officiate appearances, where everything must go deep to reveal itself (landscapes, roads, environments, human souls), a major of the local Police makes a 'mistake'. Innocent, in how it happened and for how there's no compromise or malice. Yet from that unexpected element, the universal judgment of a society that gropes in the sleet of fears and that has submitted - apparently without any remorse – to the demon of corruption that leaves no room. Nor choice.

The human models that the director (and here also an actor, playing Pasha, the 'villain' of the story) Yuriy Bykov, shapes to his idea of an 'emerged world', are the classic ones of conventional tragedy; few characters in focus, completely cleansed of any misunderstanding residue, driven by passions that follow each other as if marked by a clock of black figures (the beginning, the violence on the couple that lost their son, the assault on the barracks, the attempt to cover up the case), which stand out so much against the snowy mantle. And then a plethora of 'sabotaging agents', of small (but small only because the director did not know how to grasp their dramatic charge) figures that move on command, that appear and disappear from the canvas and that, in the end, drawn as they are by quick brushstrokes, leave something unresolved.

And not that the screenplay is stingy with screen-time. On the contrary. The film lasts that fateful quarter of an hour more, which makes a good action 'produkt' of new Russian cinematography, become just a decent thriller of souls (of an entire country, as large as it is complex like Russia) and bodies (pawns of a much more universal and ahistorical game).

But what to compare "Mayor" with to decipher its writing quality?

It's not easy to answer this question, although some investigation cues are provided by the director himself, while cinematographic traces – remaining clear, albeit camouflaged in the soft and ruthless realm of dramaturgical frost – can be noticed here and there, between a nod to American civil engagement cinema of the '70s and certain Soviet onslaught cinema of the various Kabadze ("Pjatno") or Balabanov ("Brat", especially). But it should be noted that Bykov's art resembles neither much the former type of cinema, as contracted in physical action as it is expanded in inner torment, nor probably the latter either, in how the development of angst is continually balanced by the awareness of what is inevitable and not provoked. If, in short, you take ¼ of Lumet's "Serpico" and add just a spit of Danila Bagrov's fury, you won't get either the taste or the smell of this film.

What can enlighten us, however, is the sequel to "Mayor", namely "Durak", the film presented just a year ago and the natural heir of the work on the narrative weight that Bykov seems, from what it seems, intent on doing. While a 'hard and pure' like Balabanov sneaks (with "I also want to", perhaps carelessly awarded in Venice three years ago) onto the minefield of the "western in a brain" which was, with unattainable results, an itinerary of Tarkovsky in 1979, with "Durak" our young Russian director seems to turn his gaze towards the global denunciation of a blind, deaf, and mute system that has nothing mysterious or atavistic inside itself. The social conflict is loosened in a series of converging actions, of absurd stances and open feuds that any anthropologist could quickly archive in a single word: disintegration. A total refusal of abstraction and any formalism, which opens the doors to even more incisive cinema and devoted to problematic dialogue with the audience. "My artistic ambitions are about connecting with people," Bykov has publicly stated. And here the game is set.

Above there was talk of "innocence", and here one wants to contest how this virtue of the initial sin transforms, through the doubts that increasingly lead Major Sergey Sobolev to collide with the certainty of his colleague Pavel's impunity and his superiors, into a sort of final depravity, completed with shots to the back of the neck of a defenseless woman and unarmed man. Who was 'incidentally' in the wrong at the beginning of the film becomes 'traitorously' a murderer at the end. A sharp reversal of much of the latest generation action-movie that makes the hero or villain's turn of events a source of emotional decontamination. Here there is no possibility of judgment, and the rush that accompanies the protagonist in finally embracing his wife and newborn son has nothing whatsoever of solace or human release. The darkness that follows the final scene, that of the truck's hitchhiking while a blood-soaked sunset invades the horizon, we know for sure will not cauterize the sufferings. Of the characters, as of the entire film. So much so that half a star remains in my hands, and I can't find a way to pin it on this sheet in front of me.

But in the shimmering and dark sky of the chimneys of the Ryazan Oblast, no one – we are sure – will notice.