Best of the year: Alice Taiga advises melodrama
2015 IS FITTING THE END. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the year turned out to be saturated, including culturally. To dot the “and” and make sure that nothing important had passed by, we asked experts in various fields to tell about the brightest books, films, albums and other cultural events. In the tenth issue, journalist, artist and our permanent columnist Alisa Taezhnaya recommends watching historical melodrama - the best, in her opinion, for many years.
Alice Taiga
journalist
Frankly, the second time on the same movie I went only a few times - to the last part of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Sweet Frances and The Wolf of Wall Street. In such an incredible thrill of melodrama, in which I was from the “Brooklyn”, I was never.
In one long trip, I discovered Nick Hornby for me in English, reading the jokes and dialogues in the original - as a dinner with the best, funniest, and kind people on earth. This is one of the best writers who chose to be a writer. A year ago, Nick Hornby adapted a well-known English-speaking audience a novel about Irish girl Aylis in Brooklyn.
The story is simple: the elder sister collects money for the younger one so that she can get a life in America that does not shine for her in her native Ireland. To work at the counter in groceries, to lay down her husband after several pints of Guinness, to care for her elderly mother, to give birth without asking any questions. Ailis arrives in Brooklyn with a homesickness, excitedly reads letters from her older sister, misses green meadows and the wind of the cold sea. She finds a job in a prestigious shop, rents a room with an old lady and meets an Italian plumber who falls deeply in love with her. But she needs to go back home, and there is a tall, red-haired and so familiar Irish guy - and Brooklyn will be across the ocean already, like a plumber in love and dancing on Fridays.
I can not stand melodrama for the way they insert words and phrases into the mouths of the characters that people never say to each other, but for some reason they dream to hear. No matter how much I fell in love myself, there was no thunder out of the blue, singing angels during a kiss (and even during a wedding) and those right words after which it became clear - this is he, snap soon! After the evening my first love gave me 10 rubles a minibus together and sent me out of my house. The second one was dragging through the frost on the opening days of friends and forgot to call two times out of three. My third love kissed me under the counter of a music store, where he then worked when I told him that my favorite band is Coil. My last and greatest love brought me a bag of gifts from another country from the fair trade store, never seeing me. And none of them had ever said those very prepared phrases for a special occasion that hang in the air in melodramas. Nobody floated through the air to meet me, did not seem invulnerable and indisputable.
Nick Hornby is with me, he also feels something like that. Apparently, he, too, did not have time to say those very words, but he perfectly remembers everything else that lovers say to each other: vague plans and comedic promises, innocent subclauses out of the blue and foolish compliments that somehow sink into the heart. "When I'm with you, you're my only home" - the story of "Brooklyn" that there is not the same house where you want to return, if a person appears in life, next to whom you always want to be. Now he is your future, your apartment, your occupation, your children, your so imperfect, but such is your life. Emory Cohen plays the first guy in my memory, for whom I want to go to the ends of the world, because he is sweet, witty, kind heart and generally a little Labrador. He stumbles, sneezes and champs. He is alive, you believe him.
Hornby perfectly registers two types of men with whom it seems like the right idea to link life. The first one is imperceptibly similar either to the father, or to the most important senior person in life: with him, life will be so habitual, safe and clear. The second is from a new universe in which the devil breaks a leg. He has a ton of flaws, just like you, but in the main he is as simple as three rubles, and he spreads himself all over you like a carpet: "Sit back, dear." He can wait for months before you change your mind and pay attention to him, but he is harder and more magical than you can dream. “Brooklyn” is love itself, from the first to the last frame.