Paper Moon 4K 1973

Great Depression-era America. Nine-year-old Kansas orphan Addie Loggins is quite independent: she frowns at cigarettes one after another, quotes Franklin Roosevelt as scripture, listens to adult radio programs before bedtime, and keeps her mouth shut. But if you ask her a question about her father, she can hardly find anything to say. She once thought it was Mr. Connors, who stroked her head and bought her sweets. Oh, and Mr. Pritchard had smiled at her once... But both of them didn't have her chin. Her mother, of course, was a blooming beauty who would never have been allowed to go to Holland, lest she should shame the tulips of Amsterdam. At her death she left her daughter two hundred dollars, a photograph, a hat and perfume in a sweet box, and at her funeral a stranger with a suspiciously genotype-matching chin brought flowers taken from a neighboring grave. Perhaps he has a conscience, though it's just as likely he has a stolen one. He is Moses Pray, a sop-man, a confidence swindler, traveling the country like a tumbleweed and selling fake personalized Bibles to lonely widows. Of course, he has no money, no apartment to put the money in, not even a key to open the apartment with. A little brat with a she-wolf look and a hapless combinator with a charming smile - their paths cross in the most ridiculous, but quite predictable way. According to the very magic principle of pairing two boots-skorozhodov.

A passionate fan of silent cinema and the golden era of Hollywood, Peter Bogdanovich created a touching movie in its old-fashioned charm. A filigreed retro stylization filled with humor, tenderness, sadness and hope for happiness. Careful reproduction on the screen of the spirit of cinema of that period: almost archival images, authentic jazz and folk, uncomplicated dialogues, instant “readability” of emotions. The cinephile director invited us to the “Pleasantville” era he adored: when grass and sky were black and white, people were naive, cashiers were gullible, wine was sold from under the bootlegger's floor, and stripper girls were ready for a date for only twenty-five dollars. Escapism according to Bogdanovich: from the “disillusioned” 70s to the “depressed” 30s. Once upon a time, during the Great Depression, Hollywood offered cheap entertainment - a movie that could distract from the heavy thoughts about the economic crisis. The Seventies gave the world the “cinematography of roads”: the excitement of the chase, the dust of cities and the Moebius strip twisted infinity of the road. Reverse, an attempt to escape from oneself, away from broken illusions, from the problems and sorrows of life, which on the road are imperceptibly blurred into insignificant details of the landscape flickering outside the window.

Bogdanovich's movie is incredibly intimate and at the same time universal. It is uncomplicated and yet metaphorical. A photograph of a girl sitting on a paper moon becomes a symbol of a brief stop on a journey, a freeze-frame of a life taken in a park of moving closed-circle rides. And the movie poster, on which Eddie sits on the same moon illusion already with Moses - a dream never realized on the screen, but embodied in the drawing. Photography, as the initial stage of cinematography, seems to pass the symbolic baton to drawing as the last form of art. It is not accidental that the movie begins with a popular song of those years: “You say it's just a paper moon gliding over a cardboard sky? But you'd believe in her if you believed in me.” Life, like a movie, is an attempt to decompose movement into phases of self-delusion or to create, with a quick scroll, a “24 frames-per-second truth.” And although the adventures of the characters bear the tinge of “false motion,” at a certain point in the movie another law of the road-movie comes into play: the unifying factor of the road. After all, in the end, for Moses and Eddie, as well as for the actors of the movie - father and daughter O'Neil, who officially reconciled after years of disagreement only in 2011, only one thing becomes significant - the movement towards each other. And then the reason for rapprochement can be any trifle: an impromptu invented ingenious venture, not given two hundred dollars in time, and also - suspiciously coincidental form of stubborn chin.