Speaking about his van, to whom she gave the proud name "Avangard", Fern enjoys not an impersonal pronoun IT, but as if it comes to a living being, she is. So in the Anglo-American tradition called ships, an animation of the rooks, which trust their destiny. Fern invested in "Avangard" so much fantasy, so much adjacent and patience to accommodate a conspiped minivan to a more or less comfortable life that it will now better fit into debts to fix it than it will discern and buy something new, hopefully.
Since in 2011 after the recession, the plasterboard market was collapsed and the enterprise was closed in Monogenor Empire, Nevada, which existed eighty-eight years, and after her beloved husband died, Fern wheel struggles on the roads of the Midwest, then joining the fraternity The same nomads, choosing loneliness as a way to update life. Moves it not pity for himself, so much lost, and the resistance of survival. "You, like pioneers," formulates the lifestyle of Fern and her like her sister. Pioneers called those in the XVIII-XIX centuries left her home in Europe or in the east of America and a caravan of vans moved to the West to master new territories. They did not feel unattached and could say about themselves with the words of Fern: "I'm not homeless, I just don't have a house." That were the times of the construction of the "Empire" (the United States saw a sample country in ancient Rome: In 1793, the first president of the country George Washington laid the first stone in the Capitol building - the destination of the US Congress on the Capitolian Hill in Washington, and in the capital of each state there is its Capitol ). The transformation of Empire in the ghost city is a rapidly changing country, the destruction of the old structures calling for the Americans to leave the glooming age. In the story of Jack London there is a song: "As an argonauts in an older, we hurry, throwing the house ..." But this time the Americans are in a hurry not for the "golden rune", but rather away from attempts to get it.
Awarded the "Golden Lion" of the Venetian Film Festival "Earth of Nomads" of the ethnic Chinese chloe chlenium, which grew up in America, can be found in different genres, primarily to road Movie or to genre hybrids of the type of mokumentari. But I would suggest for this film the Label "Postfikshn" by analogy with the postcase. Here are only two professional actors - in this way, it is slightly bluntly inflated screening of the documentary book of the journalist Jessica Bruder with a subtitle "Survive in America in the XXI century". In general, according to the type of statement, this film seems to me closest to the "stream of impressions" - the book of Hipster Jack Keroaca "on the road." His autobiographical romance is compiled on the basis of diary records about the wandering of two friends, on the path of which are found like Jessica Bruner, real people who only appear on his pages under pseudonyms.
The road, in Keruak, and there is a life itself, which will lead from symbolic death within the borders of the city - the world of constant routine work and impose a lot of obligations of family bonds. "We will be wizards with wizards!" - proclaims Fern Credo his salvation from such a "death." Her tempting temptation is Fern in the form of a cozy existence in the house of a prosperous married sister or together with a very non-indifference to it, if not to say more, Dave. Dave, with whom Fern met on the road, plays (under his name) Professional actor David Streytarn. And the main professional actress in the film is twice Oskarone Francis McDormand. She visited the guise of different averages American - a purposeful pregnant police officer in Fargo Brothers Cohen, seeking Mildred's justice from Martin McDona in "Three Billboards on the border of Ebbing, Missouri," and now she Fern is another middle American, this time choosing a journey How to live your life. Fern is a key figure of "nomad land", which opens up the door to a large world, inhabited by unreasonable heroes of the new class.
In the popular encyclopedia of American life - the television series "Simpsons" - there is such an episode. Homer comes out of the car on Highwee, throwing a guy driving: "Thank you, Jack Keruac," and he stretches his manuscript on paper A4 with a note "final version" and a bulk scroll, saying: "This is this corrected manuscript, throw in the mailbox, And this roll of emissions so that no one saw him. " As soon as Homer got from the author's hands, the legendary first option, printed on the glued sheets of Japanese paper, the scroll, who retained the living impressions of the road life, instantly crumbles into the dust, to the horror of Homer, the worship of Keroaca, caring into the sky. Chloe Zhao just sought to have time to capture the elusive real life of real people precisely as it is, and not in the united chorporal editors version.
However, in the intonation of Roman Keroaca and Broj books (as well as the film Zhao) there is a significant difference. Keroac and his buddy Neil were jazzniks (Jazzniks), and improvisation book, writing in the Euphoria of the victorious post-war 1940s, was originally going to jazz style. In the "land of nomads" they play and sing not jazz, but blues, by the mood, harmonizing with meditative minimalism Soundtrack Louis Einautically. The word "blues" is translated as "longing"; He was born earlier than fun jazz, although decades later jazz and grew up from these sad songs, infused on nostalgic memories of the happy past, which cannot be returned.
Introducing the temporary seasonal work - a packer on the sorting warehouse of the Amazon concern, the servers in the roadside network cafe, a cleaner in the National Park of Badlends, - Fern is in Western states, meeting on the path of the same nomads. For the most part, these are elderly people who have encountered on the slope of the years with a perspective of poverty. Linda Mei, for example, who worked from the twelve years, which raised two daughters, admits: having learned that she shines only 550 dollars earned pension per month, he was thinking about suicide. Merry in the events that deprived them at home or pushing them to leave their house, little. But everyone has a reason not to succumb to despondency: even in poverty you can find a light side - you now do not depend on the pleasure of the Almighty Dollar, you can go there, where I have long dreamed of visiting, or like Charnels of the Swamps, go back where it was once happy . The swamps shared with the Fern with the memory of how incredible bliss she felt at the foot of the cliff, completely destroyed bird nests. Swallow flew around, and she herself, reflected in the lake water, seemed to fly in their stack. Knowing how much it is measured to live on this earth, the swamps hurries to return to those edges. In memory of this woman or wanting to experience the same sacred happiness, Fern will also get there. And it will try to return to her back where it was happy, but it will be convinced that there is no point in the empty walls to the destroyed hearth.
Screen-real nomads are not hipsters, not careless rises of the era of the counterculture, not a professionally marginalized potariat (the character of Greach Grea Hervig); They are the heirs of Henry David Toro, who preserved the anthem with loneliness, saving from boring dependence on someone else's opinion and imposed rules. Toro supplied in the middle of a last century over the experiment of voluntary self-insulation (relevant, it should be said, the experience, useful now not only in America) proved that it is quite possible to live out of society, pleaseing it necessary. Moreover, at the disposal of nomads, the virgin nature in which the landscape players of the Hudsan school saw the standard of divine purity, it became an inevitable source of updates. Today, a similar philosophy preaches another hero of the film - the Guru of American Nomadicity Bob Wells, which arranges a two-week meeting of like-minded people in Arizona for the new year.
"" Titanic "sinks," the Wells proclaims, making the verdict of the usual, Mnimo Sustainable Life Department, and tends to meet the promising art of "live on the road". Parked his vans, in Christmas days, people sing and dance, gather by the fire and experience common emotions, becoming participants in almost magical, ritual neoarhaic acts. Meetings with strangers open up new pages of life and provide new experience with the disinterested participation of grateful listeners of their own stories about loss, illness, family troubles. They do not exude impulsive joy, but they are free because they are not trying to keep their best to stay on the usual life path, they are the owners of their lives and can afford mindlessly, albeit melancholy, enjoy the eternal beauty of nature. Fern, in the service list of tried works of which there is both a "replacement teacher", also listens to others and talks about himself, about their main values - family album and cheap plates that the father bought on seasonal sales. Maybe she will share and useful advice. Having met again on the road with a young guy Derek, she learns that in the north he has a favorite girl, but the letters to her do not promise reciprocity. And Fern reads Derek Shakespeare's sonnet 18 - recognition in love that suddenly will help. Because she knows the price of love, keeping the bitter memory about the loss of his beloved husband.
The presence on the screen Francis McDermannd, like her heroine in discourse, delicately and unobtrusively. The actress does not load the frame of an active action, she is attentive and sympathetic observer, not aspiring the meaningful or estimated view of the film; Her eyes are always addressed either to the interlocutor, or follow the road or for the objects of work, which is engaged. It is symbolic in this sense by her passage with Bengal Fire past the vans of nomads, whom she congratulates Happy New Year. She resembles the heroine of the poetic play of Robert Browning "Pippa is passed", in 1909 by David Griffit. Pippa simply passes, singing, by other people's homes, and everyone becomes a little better from this.
The film has a lot of frames taken through the windshield of the van, and Fern appears in front of us in the rays of the Sun, on the background of the sandy desert, flying snow ... Just as Griffith managed without words to translate the poetic language of the English playwright-philosopher in the exquisite visual game of lighting , Operator Joshua James Richards, who had previously performed the song of the road in the previous film Chloe, Zhao "Rider" (The Rider; 2017), inscribed the heroes of her new picture into a fantastically beautiful, immense world of virgin nature, establishing an eloquent hierarchy with fleeting and unreliable industrial civilization.
In Badlands National Park (Park "Bad Lands", as this rocky area of southern Dakota Aboriginal-Indians called) Fern makes symbolic selfie from the advertising shield of the famous Memorial on Mount Rashmor, where the bas-relief of four American presidents is carved - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt And Abraham Lincoln, whose activity identified the most important points of history and growth of America. Together with them, together with the pioneers and heroes of the front, with their fate arranged the law and order of the country, the fragile Fern fits into the national mythology, which opens one of the new pages.