The rental of the "Nomads" of Chloe Zhao is the most awarded and recognized film of the pandemic 2020. Road Movie with Francis McDormand took the chief "golden lion" of the Venetian film festival, a prime of audience sympathies in Toronto, as well as the statues of the best film and the director on the last authority of the Golden Globus. Alexey Filippov also went to Odyssey in America to figure out how this film caught a pulse and new time, and eternity.
The 60-year-old Fern (Macromanand) spent most of his life in the town of Empire, Nevada. She worked as a teacher, her husband was at the plant for the production of plasterboard. Then he died, and the enterprise itself was closed in 2011. Then Fern plunged the entire few Skarb to the van and went on the roads of an immense homeland - so that on Christmas Eve to start a new life, it was nowhere to start roots.
"Earth of nomads" - the third film of the independent American director of Chinese origin Chloe Zhao, which "specializes" on the stories of people squeezed by the framework of reality. And "Songs that brothers taught me" (2015) and "Rider" (2017) are cut off from the "Big Earth" with life in reservation. In the first - the children of indigenous Americans dilute the usual wreckage of American dreams; In the second, the talented horses trample gets injury and painfully bother with the thought that he will not become a star of Rodeo and his masculin ideal.
Empire, whose population was 200 with a small person, also, in general, the reservation is an administrative unit, not suitable, according to the US census bureau, even under the format of the community. Here Fern has grown to the soil - to which Zhao, by the way, is also experiencing increased interest - forgetting for the time of marriage and work on love for loneliness and open spaces. The back yard of her houses went into the endless wasteland, who manifested the eternal option of escape and travel. And here is the road.
In the "land of nomads", a whole premium of the mythology of American life is closed. From the commandments of the secluded existence of Henry Toro to the poetics of highways, which long before Jack Keroaca manifes change, a new stage and personal evolution; Less than ten years ago, Alexander Pain took a black and white drama about the old man and the road, where the phantom grace of the American dream becomes Nebraska - the Fern comes here. From the romance of the frontier and the accurate profiles of pilgrims to the wasteland, the efforts of Terrens Malik, who also became synonymous with the new hope in the open world in the open sky. In the 1973 film of the 1973 film, the pair performed by Sissi Sissek and Martin Bus), like Bonnie and Clyde, fled from a plungeless hopelessness and killed everyone who got up on their way.
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The prototypes of those heroes became a real duet, who was performed in Nebrask in the 1950s, - and the film Zhao also grows not just from the soil of the American independent and vital philosophy of the United States in general, but from the documentary book Jessica Bruner with the same name and subtitle "Survive in America XXI century "Where the history of modern nomads is recorded. The secondary heroes of the film - non-professional actors who act themselves, are talking to documentary monologues from the book, and the binding thread of the epos, folded from the letters of other people's lives, acts fictional Fern. The second professional character is sympathetic to her nomad David (David Stratäirn).
Looking like beads of different shapes, sizes and moods on the plot thread, new and new scenes are planned, you might think that the "earth of nomads" is a mosaic of American life. A pensive festival kaleidoscope, in which the alternation of solemn landscapes, large plans and documentary details creates a polyphony of ideas - social (loss of work and a small pension), psychological (severe loss and non-accuracy) and existential (desire for freedom and harmony).
However, Zhao, forcing the weather and the landscape to serve the seismograph of the spiritual states of Fern, it works not with rosary meanings, but with layers. It is not by chance that three films in a row of her heroes are not only people, but the Earth itself, the soil and even the old stones, in which the air had once accumulated. Her director is not an accent, but a discharged, offering an archaeological approach to history: to cover the lives of heroes in front of the reservoir, gesture behind the gesture, holiday for the holiday, city outside the city.
"The land of nomads" intently monitors the Fern, which the state is easier to rinse, but it is impossible to live on these payments. Her simple life gradually exposes various faces not only the heroine, but also the very space of American life. In no way, the film and Fern do not go to the end - so the wheel never comes into contact with the ground for a long time, leaving the monotonous track of the entire surface of the rubber body.
Chloe Zhao does not put a goal to explain why Fern runs. She is probably tens of answers: the ghost of the late husband, who, as it worries, will dissolve outside the concentrated memory; The desire to be free - from capitalist shackles, other people's senses, rapidly growing children, the same type of landscapes; Shadows of unfulfilled hopes or cargo of the past, which materializes non-good fabrics marked with their parents, spouse, friends. Her house is always with her - not only on balding wheels and in broken plates, but in the head that remembers the monologue from the "Macbeth" and the 18th Sonnet Shakespeare ("Do I compare you from the summer day?" Are you more beautiful and softer ... " ; per. Igor Fradkin).
"Countless" Tomorrow "," Tomorrow "," Tomorrow "// steamed with a small step, day after day, // to the last letter of the inscribed date; // And all the" yesterday "lost the madmen // The path to dusty death. Extlive, Spar! " (Per. Mikhail Lozinsky) - recites the girl in the supermarket, remembering the longtime lesson. This poetic seal is a monologue of Fern that she is not homeless, it just doesn't have a house (not homeless, and Houseless - "Not the same thing, right?"). And this clear awareness does not make it defective - although David, under the accompaniment of the family atmosphere of Thanksgiving Day, and invites her to stay with him and his new-acquired relatives who are honored the newborn grandson. On the contrary, this awareness in the definition exempts from everything that fixes the boundaries today and tomorrow: the house ingrown into the ground, ordered by the geolocation of life, asked by family and future children with rhythm.
Fern exists like a time. No one is cramped with a small step. Time is scattered on the wasteland, like a fabulous pollen. Before the earth, says astronomer, the light of one star with a delay in a quarter of a century. In the air - sprayed particles of celestial bodies that stopped exist. In the ground - there are dinosaurs bones, which returned to our world with statues and Mahina vans, in whose veins the oil blood containing DNA of primitive gigids.
In the films of Chloe, Zhao is easy to feel the "Terrensmalikovskoye" celebration, but their optics are the opposite: a lively classic looks like from heaven, packaging history and fate into archetypical postures (mother, father, man); The ascending star looks into the emphasis - and sees a whole universe dissolving in a huge complex world, which you can never know about you, but at the molecular level - will never forget.
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As if ironizing over this sprayed mythologicalness, the director sends Fern in a cinema where the first "Avengers" (2012) are coming. Next project Zhao - "Eternal" for the filmsened Marvel. Perhaps there is no candidacy better to combine the cosmic and human within the film. In any case, Zhao managed to remove the film, the maximum capturing vibration of the emerging 2020s: longing for freedom of movement and the moment of concentration on the internal, interior. I want to exclude myself from the inertia and enter into the stream of sands of time. And this road will melt forever.
"Earth of nomads" at the box office from March 11.