Provide a social satirical cartoon, Russian film "The Fool of the Dangerous Building": A Gentleman Does Not Stand Under the Dangerous Wall?

Stills from "The Fool of the Dangerous Building"

In 2014, Yuri Bekov, who wrote and directed the Russian film "The Fool of the Dangerous Building", won the Don Quixote Award special nomination award at the Locarno International Film Festival, one of the four major European film festivals, for "revealing the mysterious depth of human nature through the attention of human suffering, failure and hope, while having artistic value", and many industry critics called it "one of the best Russian films in recent years". Recently, this film has become a hot topic for Chinese audiences.

The Russian name of the film is Дурак, which literally translates to "Fool, Fool", and the English translation is simply "The Fool". Chinese the title of the film explains the situation (the dangerous building), and one can't help but think of the sentence in Mencius' "Mencius Dedication": "... It is for this reason that those who know their destiny do not stand under the rock walls..." Most later generations have summed it up as a way of exhortation to be a human being, to the effect that they should leave immediately when they perceive danger, or to take precautions when they perceive danger. Obviously, the protagonist does not know the truth that "a gentleman does not stand under a dangerous wall", so he is very aptly named "the fool of the dangerous building".

Apartment 32 in Area A of a certain city is a 9-storey endangered building that has not been repaired in the past 38 years and is in dilapidated condition. The male protagonist, Dima, receives a call at night to repair the burst hot water pipe, and finds that the load-bearing wall is broken, the foundation is sinking, and the whole building is seriously tilted, and it may collapse at any time. He informed the city hall that 820 residents needed to be evacuated immediately. After the emergency meeting, the mayor found that the budget was in serious deficit, the various institutions were corrupt, and she herself was coerced by mercenary investors, and finally decided to secretly execute the relevant responsible person to pay for the nearly 1,000 lives that were about to die, in order to protect the yarn. Dima recovered his life from under the muzzle of the gun and was told to shut up. On the way to escape, he saw that the city hall had not taken evacuation action, so he desperately returned to the apartment, knocking on the door and calling for people to leave. In the early morning of winter, people gathered under the dangerous building, but they did not realize the danger of collapse. One person scolded Dimado and deceived everyone. The crowd responded one after another, and after beating DiMa, they returned to the dangerous building, leaving only DiMa, who was beaten to death, curled up on the ground alone...

The most valuable thing about the movie is that it provides a social satire caricature in which we can vividly feel that you, me, and he or she are one of the people in the crowd. All are wandering, struggling, moving forward, dying "in suffering, failure, and hope." All criticism, anger, and lashing will become numb and weak after the immediate suffering fades away, or indulge in the empty joy of the short struggle to achieve results, and all evil will be driven by complex human nature and come back in a different outfit. The snooping and questioning of human nature will help us find the ultimate direction.

The story in the film takes place in a city much like "Gotham City" in American cinema, but the whole film does not appeal to the traditional core of American cinema: the ideal of making noble sacrifices for the masses. Dima is not Batman, he is just an ordinary plumber, he is the mother's eyes do not know how to learn to calculate in order to live a well-off life, is the wife's mouth of the child living in the adult world. Like his "foolish" father, who had been repairing public benches and preventing co-workers from stealing public property, he was "full of integrity, but his whole life lived in the dust." So we should refuse to give Dima the aura of a hero, who simply retains the goodwill that should be in human nature and the desire for social justice. Rather than expecting "romantic politics" and fantasizing that all people are completely selfless and always acting in the interests of society, we might as well call for the seeds of goodwill in ordinary humanity that can break ground when it comes to life and death.

The corrupt state bureaucracy mirrored by Yuri Bekov is not the absolute antithesis of the people at the bottom, and they, like most economists of public choice theory, have embraced the fate of everyday politics – not to try to transform politicians and officials into selfless people. In real life, they also play a variety of roles, combining consumers, managers, partners, electors, etc., they are sons, fathers and husbands, but also wives, daughters and mothers, and they act according to the different principles of each identity. Based on this, all the bureaucrats in the film have a different side of human nature. Mayor Nina, who comes from a poor peasant family, also tries to sacrifice and struggle at all costs before saving the residents of the dangerous building from water and fire, but she instinctively chooses to compromise compared with the small rescue effect and the fear that she may return to the bottom of life. The director of the Housing Authority, who embezzled the repair funds without authorization, suddenly appeared the brilliance of human nature when he was dying, and rescued Dima, who had brought himself the misfortune of killing himself at gunpoint, this unfathomable mysterious human nature made the film seem particularly real and touching.

People returned to the dangerous building, and all of Dima's actions did not work. In the eyes of everyone, Dima is a nosy fool who speaks for the crowd but is beaten miserably. In the overhead shot from God's point of view, the crowd is a fool who does not know what to do or what is wrong, and who is not yet clear on the verge of death. We were all once Dima and finally became everyone else. Before Dima returned to the dangerous building, he returned home to say goodbye to his father, and the "old version of Dima", who had always encouraged Dima's integrity and frankness, actually persuaded his son to stay at home for the first time and save his life. This is not cowardice, nor is it the instant demise of the genes of integrity and kindness in the past, it is the first time that the "old version of Dima" admitted the truth in the real world: "We live like animals, we die like animals, because we have no importance to each other." You often want to help and save other people's lives, but people want to kill you. The world around this has never changed anything, never. ”

Source: Beijing Daily

Author: Dayu

Process Editor: Wu Yue