[Postman's White Night] Belye nochi pochtalona Alekseya Tryapitsyna Director: Andrei Koncharovsky Starring: Alexei Teja Peterson /Timmer Podalkov/Elena Omlova Release Date: 2015.06.08
[The Postman's White Night] focuses on ordinary ordinary people and recalls their dying spiritual beliefs.
Another island
Russia's Klodzero Lake has stepped into the far north, where you can see colorful auroras in winter, and white nights that will no longer be dark in summer, gray skies, long and boring days. Here, there exists an isolated village, where Andrey Konchalovsky has been there for eight months, where the quiet scenery of the Arctic gives people a spiritual comfort, and Koncharovsky's previous impetuous heart has calmed down, and the ordinary has been left behind.
This time he wanted to make a film belonging to Russian civilians, and he tried to restrain his emotions and give everything to the ordinary actors selected from the villagers. Thus, there are white nights when there are thousands of quiet nights, and there are postmen who toss and turn in the white nights.
Disappearing villages
Andrey Koncharovsky's brother is Nikita Mikhalkov, the "Scorching Sun", [The Barber of Siberia], and one of them is in charge of art and the other is in charge of politics. It's also interesting to say that last year's [heat stroke] in Mikhalkov taught people not to forget history, while [The Postman's White Night] wanted to unshackle ordinary people who had been imprisoned in the past. The former is for young people and the latter for older people.
But it's also about talking about pain, [heat stroke] juxtaposing good love with brutal killing, and [the postman's white night] suffering is less brutal. As Koncharovsky himself said: "I am only an observer, not responsible for expounding opinions".
The same scenery, the same thing, is not the same for people with different life experiences. Koncharovsky, who has become an elder, presents what he saw in Lake Klodzero to the audience through the technique of white painting. In this respect, this heavy work has surpassed Koncharovsky's most famous epic masterpiece [Song of Siberia] before it.
Russia is vast and has many forgotten corners. The Far North and Siberia are sparsely populated and in harsh conditions, and the people who live there are forgotten by the city and its prosperity. It was not until the time of Stalin's Great Purge that some people remembered them, and such barren lands were used as labor camps and prisons to eliminate political dissidents, and they were recorded in history and had a "glorious" stroke. Later, the drastic changes in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the noisy socialist romantic ideal period has gone away, the villages there still exist, but suddenly thrown out of history and reality, double forgotten in the dusty corners, no one thinks about these "sad places" that have been destroyed.
The village on the isolated island is the orphan of this era, isolated from the world, self-sufficient, and the more quiet and beautiful it is, the more it highlights its loneliness. Koncharovsky, who studied under Tarkovsky in his early years, gave him a faint nostalgia through [The Postman's White Night], which was like a piece of ice, which hurt a little when it hit, melted and turned into water.
Images carry the role of speech, and Koncharovsky does not give the village a holistic view similar to a large vista, but constructs the image of an isolated island with a small boat that paddles the lake. This is the poster of the film, and it is also the most poetic and sad painting. In the summer, the temperature difference in the far north is large, a fog is shrouded in birch forests, the breeze gently blows across the lake and ripples, and the boat slowly paddles to the middle of the lake and stops, leaving the audience with the back of the postman. He left behind the town infested by industrial civilization, which the villagers could not see, but often remembered.
Ideal for postmans
The villages on the isolated island are dying out in people's memories, but what about the people who live there, they are left behind after attracting attention, and what kind of continuation will life be in the future.
Among more than 50 villagers, Koncharovsky chose Alexei Teja Peterson to play the role of postman Rioka. Teja Pittsen looks a little funny, his smiling face resembles an acrobat, and at the same time carries an indescribable sense of melancholy. This face is indeed a good fit for such a role, the messenger who delivers letters, a former optimist, and Rioka's optimism is an embarrassment in this day and age, and so is his identity. Similar to the fate of this isolated island, his work is indispensable to the villagers, but it can only serve them, and like the isolated island, it is trampled at the wheel of the times.
Rioka is not a country knight who is willing to be isolated from his time, he is an ordinary villager like Teja Pittsen himself. But this man retains the spirit that only existed in the era of socialist fanaticism in the Soviet Union, has experienced collective farms and social mass production movements, has unrealistic ideals for the future of mankind, and is notoriously diligent, honest, selfless, and simple.
After the collective fanaticism of the whole people, a person who sticks to his ideals will always have a little thought left, and this idea is reflected in his nostalgia. At the beginning of the film, his voice appears before his face, and in his hand are old photos. The photographs recount his past life, volunteering to join the army, moving houses, participating in the construction of collective farms, divorcing, good friends drowning in drunkenness, quitting drinking, and then he flatly added "It's been a long time ago." He also "returned" to the long-abandoned school building, standing in a ruin and imagining hearing the fiery red song with a sluggish expression.
The ideal era left him, in addition to nostalgia for the old feelings, but also the habit of treating people and things that he advocated in the past. He never looked like a public official on the island, nor did he wear a uniform, wearing a tattered camouflage uniform all day long. Rioka is happy with her job and drives a speedboat from town to village every day, flirting with the post office aunt.
Sending letters, pensions, newspapers to the whole village, carrying food from the town and news from the outside world, was a good old man who thought about others all the time, or rather, he was the ideal postman of the people of the old days. He said to his friend Abang, "Even if people use the Internet, someone will always need bread and newspapers," and a drunken Abang asked, "But what if we all die?" Do you still need a postman? ”。 By this time they had gone far, and we could not see their expressions, but heard Rioka's firm reply: "We will not all die", what an "idealized" sentence.
Rioka's act of falling in love with Irina also has an element of sticking to her ideals. Irina was a former activist, a class president in middle school, and still a public official. Irina's husband died a year ago, and she seems to be suffering from the same disease as Rioka, but their spiritual pursuits are very different. Unwilling to leave his homeland, Rioka still clings to agricultural civilization, teaching Irina's child Timka to plow the land and roll potatoes for the winter. Irina, on the other hand, longed for the bustle across the lake, and the single mother looked down on the poor Rioka, and finally she got in the car to the big city of Arkhangelsk, without even looking back at Rioka, who had helped her a lot.
Lonely white nights
The island entered the night, but the sky only turned gray, Rioka could not sleep, his friend Abang also pulled the blanket to the top of his head in his wooden house to toss and turn, and the sailor Yura, who lived not far away, also did not sleep all night, this long and lonely white night was really difficult.
At the beginning, Koncharovsky borrowed Rioka to send an annuity, and took the audience to visit the only four or five families in the village. The rest of the village, though not as clingy to their old ideals as Rioka, often lament that the present is not as good as ever. They can also accept the invasion of pop culture, and pop music is often played in the house. But they are more content with tradition, and only show real joy when they engage in accordion and tap dancing entertainment.
Rioka's friend Abang is a typical old Russian man, drunk to death, spending all the annuities he received on vodka. He also has the habit of petty theft, and the theft of Rioka's motor is probably the work of Abang. But in this "nasty man," Koncharovsky still found a vestige of morality. When the nursery boy in the TV tells the audience his dream of becoming an "upright and useful person to society", Abang, an alcoholic who has been an orphan since childhood, suddenly bursts into tears. The rhetoric that was once a slogan was probably a late blow for this old man who had received this kind of education since childhood, but now he was such a living.
Koncharovsky sets up several symbolic objects of magical realism effect in several places in the film, with a bit of a sense of vision in Chief Jako's work. Rioka takes the boy Timka to a mysterious realm different from the color of the isolated island, to find the monster hidden in the water many years ago, the atmosphere reaches the extreme, the monster does not appear, but this adventure makes the child born of the new era choke up. The gray cat that wanders in Rioka's room in the white night looks frightening, like the evil old society, and like the public power that appears on the island from time to time, and it appears repeatedly and lingers.
But the use of symbols needs to be adapted to the context, and the person sitting on the statue of Lenin [under the electronic clouds] although it also gives a sense of discomfort, but at least it matches the overall effect of the picture. But at the end of [The Postman's White Night], the rocket symbolizing the illusion of the mechanical age suddenly appears on the isolated island of documentary-style white painting, which really makes people play. Nevertheless, the abrupt rocket liftoff can only be regarded as a small mistake, and its overall meaning is still meaningful. Returning from the town, Rioka meets Yura, a sailor sitting by the lake smoking a cigarette, and the two men lament how things have changed, when the rocket makes a loud noise, but neither of them looks back.
All-media platform from watching movies