albur

I read several dozen comments about "The Guru" and all of them say Jimi Mistry dances well, etc. OK, he dances well. But doesn't anyone see that he just can't act?! His acting is so incredibly amateurish, I can't believe he ever got to act anywhere at all! I only saw this one movie with him, maybe he's better elsewhere. But hey, there must be tens of thousands of Indian actors, couldn't they find ONE who consistently acts better? Handsomeness alone doesn't compensate for the absence of basic acting skills. It was almost painful to watch all the scenes where Mistry is acting and not dancing. He was acting so much worse than everyone, absolutely everyone around him that it wasn't even funny, only embarrassing.

This movie only works if you don't understand Russian. Because if you do you hear the dialogue so poorly written as if it was translated from Swedish or English by an amateur, then force-fed to the Russian actors or given to the amateur kid actors to improvise on. Natural my foot! With that kind of dialogue, the characters might as well walk on stilts. It's so awful one can see the not-so-bad actors trying to make it more natural and failing as the camera rolls. Russians just don't speak Russian like that!

In fact, instead of a tragedy, this movie looks and sounds like it was made by Ed Wood. It's all in the little details, but they make make the whole movie fake.

Lilya, supposedly an Orthodox Christian, prays in front of a definitely non-Orthodox picture (I can't call it an icon). During the first minutes of the movie, Lilya runs toward the huge mud puddle, and it's so obvious she has to fall there. And she doesn't trip, she falls in it like she hits her mark. And one of the most heart-rending moments in the movie looks fake.

Lilya, who supposedly knows she has the tickets and the American visa in her passport (otherwise why would she be so sure she was going to America?) suddenly finds out she's not leaving. She's 16, so she's of age in Russia, so she can leave on her own.

Lilya, who apparently knows a thing or two how things work in Russia, surrenders her apartment just like that even though Russians have the so-called "propiska", a permanent domicile shown in their internal passports (which Lilya has since she's 16).

These things just don't work like that and they don't happen like that. Hence, the premise of the movie and what happens in it is simply fake, not real, not natural.

One more thing. Most Russian kids like Volodya like soccer, not basketball. Basketball is much less popular. It's like the movie was written with American viewers in mind. In Russia, there is no baseball or American football to speak of, and hockey is out of consideration for various reasons obvious from the movie, so the only sport left is basketball.

Well, enough about the bad and the ugly. Here are a few things I liked.

"Mein Herz brennt" ("My heart burns") is such a powerful song. Wow.

Pavel Ponomaryov, who plays Andrei, a nice Russian guy Lilya meets who works in Sweden, actually manages to speak and behave naturally, like a Russian would in real life. That's quite an achievement in this movie, given what was said above.

This movie is bad. It was badly written (also by Ryazanov) and badly directed. I love some of Ryazanov's earlier movies and thought he only couldn't do "serious" non-comedy stuff, like "Dear Yelena Sergeyevna" or "Predskazanie" ("Prophecy"). This movie shows Ryazanov's comedies are getting worse, too. The direction and camera work are slow, the drunk shtick is the same as in his "The Irony of Fate, or Happy New Year" of 25-30 years ago, Ryazanov can't act very well but took a bigger role than usual for himself, etc., etc. I saw him talk about this movie in Minneapolis, it was simply sad to see the movie after all he told the audience about it.