About valor, about exploits – and simply about Time and Man
Alexander Efremov’s creative biography has an impressive number of films – different types, genres, themes. Despite the variety of melodramas and comedies, modern and historical stories, musical and narrative, feature-length and serial, there is still a feeling that this director is making a movie about one thing. You can’t say that this is one theme, but in all the films one feels a commitment to those meanings and ideas that are fundamentally important for the author: love, honor, dignity, choice, duty. All moral imperatives that are important for Efremov, both a director and a citizen, are presented in spaces that are significant to him – the space of the family, the Motherland. These are the values that are highlighted in the plots of almost every one of his works: be it the fateful ups and downs of Ivan Shalnev from “Native Affair” or the difficult road to each other of two lonely people from “Let’s Get Married”; Nikolai’s devotion to his love from the film “Our Man in San Remo” or overcoming life’s circumstances in “The Guide”; the time of growing up in “Dunya” or the dramatic collisions in “Rhymes with Love” is not devoid of its drama; irreconcilable confrontation in the film “Sniper: Weapon of Retaliation” or the unprecedented feat of the legendary tanker from the film of the same name.
A family is that small territory behind which a larger one always opens, it is the house that is located in the center of another universe, and both of these territories are equivalent for Efremov. Events take place in the family that in one way or another connect the characters with the country and time. The hero of “Native Affairs” went through his path to feel his homeland as the place from which this path began; the living space of the blind girl from “The Guide” extends beyond the apartment into the big world thanks to city landscapes, the atmosphere of which is permeated with a feeling of bright joy and love; the vector of Dunya’s surrounding world – family, theater, apartment, streets, cities – is directed from the past to the future and filled with a feeling of hope and pleasant expectations; the dramatic tension of the characters from “Rhymes with Love” is discharged by other feelings thanks to the projection of the apartment, the medical center onto a wider world in which there is a place for hope and faith in life; behind the heroic actions of the heroes of Efremov’s “military cycle,” the presence of the homeland is always felt as an unshakable center, for the sake of which these actions are performed.
Positions and concepts that belong to the dominant categories in the life and work of Alexander Efremov were noticeable even in his first debut film “Big Love Cherednichenko N.P.”, which was presented in the almanac of young directors “In Profile and Full Face” in 1977 . Despite the almost comical story about the failed love of an elderly man, the film was filled with a light sadness that seemed to ooze from everywhere – from the circus hall, seaside streets, the home of a lonely planner. The space of his films is always perceived as wider than the boundaries indicated in the film frames. And the time that has passed since the first film is like the thread of one necklace on which new bead films are strung.
In 2023, A. Efremov’s new film “Waiting List” will be released (scripted by A. Efremov and V. Zaluzhny). The author’s embodiment of the time of action of this film claims to be a certain historical stereoscopy. In it, modern time is fraught with signs of historical time. Time illuminates and gives volume to space. The film begins with documentary footage of battles on the front line. These shots are fundamentally important to the director, as well as hard lines of information about the start of a special military operation. The chronicle with the corresponding text paints subsequent events in peaceful Belarus with a special light and gives special meaning to everything that happens next. The opening frames are like a preamble, like a beginning, emphasizing the significance of the present time, the value of what is called “peace”, “peaceful life”. These frames are like a trigger that sets all subsequent events in motion.
A waiting list in this context is a medical term for placing a patient on a waiting list to receive certain medical care. Alexander Efremov has always been interested in individuals who are capable of action, for whom duty is not the exhausting fulfillment of obligations, but the need to live in harmony with their principles and conscience. The heroes of this film are people without whose medical participation life itself is unthinkable. Their professional life is a feat for us, but for them it’s just everyday life. The everyday life of cardiac surgeons is filled with intense expectations, searches, discoveries, tragedies of loss, the happiness of preserving lives for which they fight to the end, maintaining endurance, faith and restrained love, despite difficult conflicts in their own homes.
One of these conflicts is the problem of choice. The choice is between staying in your homeland or moving to other lands, where everything seems better, more satisfying, more comfortable. This problem transfers the plot into the register of two dramas at once – family and industrial. The head physician of the clinic, a unique specialist in the field of cardiac surgery and heart transplantation (Dmitry Sutyrin, Russia), in addition to medical problems, has to solve the problem of relationships with his daughter, who wants to take her sons to Spain. A talented young surgeon (Dmitry Mukhin) is in a state of an insoluble dilemma for him: to go to Europe, which is the dream of his beloved wife and where he is expected as a sought-after professional, or to stay in his native clinic, where there is something without which he cannot imagine his life. life, where there are his patients who urgently need him.
Here a conflict is about to brew between the “overworked personal” and the “overheated public.” Mukhin subtly conveys this line “between”, this borderline state, when a little more – and the string of patience may not withstand. This is the doctor whose talent and human qualities really make the world a better place. He and his colleagues are constantly in a state of choice, sometimes doing the impossible, but it is in solving this impossible that the most important thing happens. The plot of the film is about saving the life of a young woman, with whom the life of her newborn daughter is inextricably linked. But in reality, this is salvation, improving the quality of life for thousands of our compatriots. The acting ensemble created by the director, in which famous performers, increasingly popular young people and debutants participate, conveys both the atmosphere of the medical fraternity and romantic impulses, as well as complex contradictions and conflict situations. In the film, viewers will see People’s Artist of the USSR Gennady Ovsyannikova, People’s Artist of Belarus Tamara Mironova, Honored Artist of the Republic of Belarus Valeria Arlanova, as well as Sergei Lapanitsyn, Yulia Verkhovskaya, Anton Zhukov, Artem Davidovich, Veronika Grigorovich, debutante Anastasia Vasilyeva and others.
Full version – in “NE” No. 5, 2023