LEONID PAVLUCHIK , film critic (Moscow)
Apple trees of his childhood
Remembering People’s Artist of Belarus Mikhail Ptashuk
We met Misha – it’s scary to think! – almost half a century ago. After graduating from Leningrad University, I was assigned to Minsk, to the provocative and very lively newspaper for those times, “Banner of Youth,” where I had already been to practice twice. Madly in love with cinema, on my first working day I called the Belarusfilm studio and asked about the filming of which film I could make an interesting report for the newspaper. “Go to Smolevichi, where director Mikhail Ptashuk is filming the television series “Time Has Chosen Us,” they answered me.
The next day I was already at the famous location of “Belarusfilm”, where a lot of things pleasantly surprised me, a newcomer to the world of cinema. According to my feelings at that time, in Smolevichi it was possible to make a movie on any topic – from a children’s fairy tale to an epic folk drama. Actually, this is how it happened in reality: Leonid Nechaev could film his charming “Pinocchio” in one corner of a huge location set, and at the other end Mikhail Ptashuk inhabited the scenery of a burnt school for his film “Time Has Chosen Us.” He met me – huge, noisy, with a tousled red mane – without any unnecessary ceremony. He stuck his soot-stained paw in as a greeting and immediately offered to communicate on a first-name basis, although by that time he was already a well-known director who had worked in theaters in Moscow and Kazan, who had directed the charming film “About Masha, about Vitya and the Marine Corps,” and I, I repeat, I just graduated from journalism department.
We talked a lot then about cinema, about his new film. They agreed on their love for Tarkovsky, for his Teacher Georgy Danelia, for Viktor Turov’s film “I Come From Childhood,” which was underrated at that time by Belarusian critics. I was glad that Ptashuk, for whom I began to feel more and more sympathy, did not try to “put noodles on the ears” of the young journalist, which is what many of his colleagues are so fond of. I remember that he was soberly aware of the imperfections of the script for the film “Time Has Chosen Us,” who immediately invited me to read it and express his thoughts, primarily critical ones.
By the way, he always did this – he always checked every new work on his friends and colleagues: he willingly gave scripts to read, showed the filmed material – and kept asking them to be stricter in their assessments. It happened that he abandoned scripts almost on the eve of the launch, but if he took on the work, he would bite into the material seriously. I remember how he tormented me during the final “finishing” of the film “Sign of Trouble.” “Lenya, think about how to strengthen the ending,” he asked, playing the film for the tenth time with the last, tragic chords of the film, which, in my opinion, were impeccable. He didn’t think so, and he tormented me, who was then working as a member of the script board of Belarusfilm, tormented his older friend Viktor Turov, and tormented himself…
But he still had to live and grow up to this landmark film in his life. First, it was necessary to lift the five-part block of the film “Time Has Chosen Us,” which for the director, who had previously made only two rather serene children’s films, was not an easy task in its own way. And not everything, it must be said, he ultimately succeeded in, although the film was subsequently awarded the All-Union Lenin Komsomol Prize. Of course, the film “Time Chose Us” in some places resembles common partisan “action films”, the similarities with which Ptashuk, by the way, feared in a conversation with me. There are also traditional plot twists in the film, as if rented from those films where the war was presented in a lighter image. This is especially true in the initial episodes of the film, in which the adventure intrigue comes into conflict with the tragic reality of the first days of the war – its terrible confusion, wasted blood, hot June sweat. And in the dialogues of the partisan heroes there is a lot of rhetoric, verbal pomposity, which the director saw in the script (we talked about this a lot), but could not overcome. But still…
And yet, working on this uneven, but gradually gaining sincerity and strength film became an important milestone for Ptashuk. It has become a school of professional excellence and moral courage. I remember how he was amazed by the wave of letters that came to the studio after the demonstration of the tape on the Central Television. He was especially shocked by a letter from Mordovia from a woman named Ptashuk, who in the first days of the war lost her son near Brest, and, seeing the painfully familiar material and correlating it with the director’s surname in the credits, was lit up with holy maternal hope. And the director himself now became seriously interested in the military theme, to which, it seems to me, he was “sentenced” by his entire fate. Misha, after all, belonged to that generation that was at the end of the war, at its end, but still scorched with its fiery breath. He was born in 1943, in a dugout on the outskirts of the village where his mother was hiding from the Nazis. Not everyone was given such a tragic, terrible experience at the very beginning of life…
“When you immerse yourself in material related to the war,” Misha told me, “every time you can’t shake the feeling that you saw it all yourself.” Moreover, the echo of the war overtook us, the “wounded wounded”, either with severe hunger, or with the explosion of a shell under the foot of a careless boy (several of my friends of the same age became disabled), or with the belated news of the death of my father. At the age of 27, my mother was left alone, having survived the death of her husband and two children. It’s scary to think what it was like for her to start life on the ashes of the past…
Misha often returned to his mother in his conversations. He loved her with very sincere, I would even say, passionate love. Whenever possible, I went to the village of Fedyuki in the Brest region, where she lived. He held premieres of his films there. He shot the film “I’ll Take Your Pain” near his hometown, also because he wanted to be closer to his mother. Bringing her to Minsk, he arranged consultations for her with the best doctors. He literally turned black and lost himself when his mother passed away. His conversations often included: “When my mother was still alive…”, “Now I’m an orphan”… It’s not surprising that the theme of maternal dedication became one of the main ones in his work. Many of his paintings are permeated with this bright and bitter note. They go side by side in his films – War and Mother. Like two eternal and irreconcilable antitheses. And the mother always turned out to be stronger than the war – even if she died, as happened in the outstanding, in my opinion, film “Sign of Trouble” based on the story by Vasil Bykov.
Another idea of Mikhail Ptashuk was connected with the image of the mother, alas, unrealized. I remember we did an interview with him. We talked, as it seemed to me, thoroughly and in detail. In the morning – a call: “I’ll be there right away.” He came in, as usual, disheveled, with red (as it turned out, from a sleepless night) eyes, and put the scribbled pages on the table in large, sweeping handwriting: “I wrote this at night. Edit, correct, subtract what you think is necessary, but it must definitely be included in the interview. This is what really worries me today.” It would be a sin not to quote here at least a piece of the handwritten text that I keep in my archive:
The full version is in “NE” No. 3, 2024.