Film "Bury Me Behind The Skirting Board" We Watch With A Psychologist - Reviews, Society

2023 Author: Oswald Adamson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 20:18

It is difficult to write about a film that tells about such disgusting manifestations of human nature that immediately after watching it, you involuntarily want to disown yourself, spit over your shoulder and forget about everything you saw, so as not to go then with a nasty feeling of guilt for involuntary complicity

It is even more difficult in this situation not to play the role of a lawyer or prosecutor, because we are dealing with a unique situation that excludes the possibility of applying the category of guilt - a situation of all-consuming, animalistic, hysterical "love for survival."

So, there were characters from the story of Pavel Sanaev, and then the film of the same name by Sergei Snezhkin "Bury Me Behind the Skirting Board": mother Olya (Maria Shukshina), grandmother Nina (Svetlana Kryuchkova), grandfather Savelyev (Alexey Petrenko), grandson Sasha (Sasha Drobitko) and an alcoholic uncle Tolik (Konstantin Vorobyov), who is also the current husband of Olga's mother. And the uniform Shakespearean drama with raging passions and murder was played out in this separately taken family. But in a strange way, based on the results of the tragedy that was played out from all this "honest company", no one pity, except for the boy, because he is still very small.

LOVE AS A CRIME

Since this whole story is filmed in a flashback genre, there are two great temptations. On the one hand, to limit the explanation of what is happening by the psychiatric diagnosis of the grandmother and the alcoholic codependency of the daughter. And on the other hand, to see in this narration another "crap" for Soviet times and to reduce everything to "objective circumstances" - they say, under the Soviet Union, everyone lived like that.

In both cases, the picture will turn out, to put it mildly, incomplete.

So let's agree right away - the anti-Semitism of the elderly, the psychiatry of the grandmother, the grandfather's title of People's Artist of the USSR and the dissident habits of Tolik the alcoholic can be safely taken out of the “brackets” of what is happening.

So, let's start, of course, with the grandmother.

First, as it is sung in the famous song: "Father-who-perverted, grandma is healthy!" "Borderline", of course (that is, granny is on the verge of norm and pathology), but a healthy old woman, with the scale of her image and the fatal consequences of her actions, is quite worthy to take a place among the famous Russian literary characters: the old countess from Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades", the old woman the pawnbroker Fyodor Dostoevsky and other inhabitants of this virtual nursing home, up to the "Old Woman" Kharms. But instead of a song compote ("Father-tots-pervert, eats compote!") Our heroine with appetite devours the people closest to her. To be honest, the convincingness of this image is striking - nothing superfluous, everything is logical, consistent and scary …

What happened to this creature with a fine mental organization, a former actress, that all her talent, her whole life is now devoted to a single goal - to fight for life and death with the closest people - her daughter, husband and grandson?

One could try to blame everything on the hard life and the loss of the first-born, if it were not for the grandmother's “acting” repeatedly emphasized in the plot, which she deliberately uses for manipulation. It seems that the grandmother at some point found her suffering so unbearable that she privatized the right not only to suffer herself, but also to involve others in this suffering.

Thus, the grandmother adapted, survived, overcame her helplessness at the cost of making everyone around her helpless. At the same time, she continues to live in survival mode. Hence pathological greed, fear of change, suspicion and misanthropy. To paraphrase Erich Fromm, this is not survival "for", but survival "from", or, more precisely, "by". The grandmother derives her energy from the fact that she continuously imposes on others a feeling of guilt, thereby making them dependent and helpless, and then she “crucifies” them for this very helplessness.

As a result of the long-term use of such an original method of adaptation, the grandmother has several cross-cutting life topics.

HONESTY

Impermissible, "ultimate" honesty in relationships with others, available only to a completely decomposed personality. After all, what's going on? The grandmother, saving her grandson from numerous illnesses (the cause of which is largely herself), no longer has the mental strength to a hypocritical attitude towards the "eternally ill" and therefore cuts the truth-womb, treating the child's consciousness with wonderful definitions - "rot", "carrion", "Bastard" and so on.

At the same time, the pathological nature of the situation is also manifested in the fact that "normally" it is the very ill children who are the main manipulators in the family, and in our case this role was categorically monopolized by the grandmother, who is "the sickest child." No wonder she throws him a "childish" hysteria bordering on a nightmare (falls to the floor, yells, scratches his face), forcing a 7-year-old boy to take the comforting position of an adult man in relation to himself.

As a result, the grandmother persistently tries to create a symbiotic relationship with her grandson, that is, excluding the possibility of existence without each other, a connection (“I will die and you will die”). At the same time, she does not see in Sasha a continuation of herself in the future, trying to use him "here and now", as a tool, as a weapon, as a thing.

By and large, the grandmother in Sasha's upbringing makes virtually the only mistake and the only crime - projecting her conflicted relationship with her daughter onto her grandson, she demands from the child not just the manifestation of an "allied" position, but a choice between her and the mother. And children do not forgive such things!

WINE AS PASSION

As a matter of fact, Sasha is the only one of all the participants in the drama who, due to his age, is almost not subject to the main "secret weapon of grandmother" - the virtuoso imposition of guilt on others. By instilling this wonderful feeling, you can work miracles with people. It gives unreasonable power, but fragile power in front of children's love.

After all, even by her death, the grandmother manages to impose a sense of guilt on her daughter and husband. All adults, without exception, and even the grandmother herself, but not little Sasha, fell on this hook. Of the entire Shakespearean set of grandmother's passions, only love and hate are available to him: love for the mother, hatred for healthy children ("Healthy, bitch? Here for you!") - and even cold indifference to the unloved grandmother (a wonderful ending of the film, when Sasha with childlike spontaneity begins to divide grandmother's money right above the opened grave).

EDUCATION AS A CURSE

In fact, the first "failure" of the model of grandmother's upbringing was given by her mother Olya, who quite naturally grew up as a dependent person, but at the same time managed not only to realize her protest nature, but also somehow miraculously escaped twice from the caring embrace of her grandmother in marriage, leaving taken hostage by his son Sasha. And the grandmother had only to be angry, together with the grandfather silently watching the "fall" of the stupid "daughter-mother", and to turn her son against the "apostate". At the same time, elderly spouses perceive their daughter's life solely as a reproach for the fact that they "blinked" the beauty, and now it is too late to raise her, but they are honestly trying. By the way, the grandmother does not voice her daughter's expectations.

And here the imaginary "antipodes" of old people appear on the stage - a couple of mother Olya and Tolik the alcoholic, a retired actress without specific occupations and an alcoholic artist. They are remarkable in the sense that they are a vivid example of codependent intellectual relations, that is, a muddy mixture of infantilism, helplessness, an inescapable craving for the high and alcoholism. At the same time, the remnants of the moral freedom they demonstrate are clearly regulated by the poverty of existence, and the ability to "do an act" manifests itself only in the logic of the protracted adolescent crisis. Because both the purchase of the railway for Sasha with the money received from the sale of someone else's binoculars, and the demonstrative return of the sheepskin coat bought for his own money to grandfather Savelyev, despite all the seeming pathos of what is happening,They are smashed to smithereens on one small fact - Olya and Tolya have long been living for their grandfather's money. And in fact, they are as much an integral part of the codependent system of family relations created by the grandmother as the people's artist who is always guilty before his wife.

By and large, this whole story is a detailed excursion into the perverse, awkward ways of showing love. Grandfather verbally hates his daughter, but in fact helps her with money. The grandmother hates everyone and adores her grandson, but most of all she loves herself. Mom Olya loves Sasha, but is bound hand and foot by the myth of his own worthlessness learned from childhood, Tolik loves Olya, but is unable to cope with his diagnosis. And only little Sasha is really capable of a feat for the sake of his beloved mother.

By the way, the departure of my grandmother is also remarkable, who at some point "played too much" and did not calculate the degree of her moral decline, for which, having shown her bare ass at parting, she honestly paid with her life.

At the same time, by her death, she actually put a big question mark in the further fate of all the surviving characters. Will they be able to overcome themselves? And how much stronger than common sense will the fruits of grandmother's upbringing be?

However, the sprouts of recovery were planted in Sasha's soul by the grandmother herself: indifference is a very powerful medicine.