‘Do you know what our problem is, Sasha? The fact that we have no problems’ (ACID)
I wish I wrote this earlier, right after I got back from the screening and the memory was fresh. But I got distracted.
This film is directed by a young 27 year old actor turned director and scripted by Valery Pecheykin. It touched me. Deeply.
Watching this film, I felt like I was taken back to my high school years, which was pretty intense time for me. Not being aware of my issues, I remember getting into all sorts of trouble. Just to give you an idea, I attended my prom with my face half purple because I fell on it while wasted a couple of weeks before. Though the main characters in the movie are male and by a couple of years older than the time I took from my biography, the motifs of being lonely, disconnected and misunderstood brought me back to that time when I lived with my parents back in Russia.
‘It didn’t make any sense to me, why you were acting that way. You are a girl, and this usually what guys go through. I had no idea why this was going on ’ says my mum. The film depicts major issues that are common in Russia - not having a father, young people committing suicide, feeling deadlocked.
In a nutshell, the narrative is about a few young guys, who are somewhat creative (sculptor and two musicians), and one would say belong to that ‘hipster’ ‘millennial’ category. The setting is unclear on purpose, but reminds me of Moscow suburbs where I grew up. The script is multi layered, so ‘Acid’ here is a bottle of actual hazardous acid that appeared in the film multiple times is symbolical - one of the characters, Pete, attempts to drink it, sometimes shakes it in his hand from time to time, probably having suicidal thoughts. The second interpretation is, of course, a psychedelic drug. Some scenes have that ‘trippy’/dreamy feel to them. What is touched me is that the film is penetrated with the motifs of alcohol and drug use, unhealthy intimacy and suicide, and it is shown very explicitly and intensely. What fascinates me about this movie, is that it is tense, melodramatic, realistic, raw (everything I like) and kind of surrealistic at the same time (that ‘Acid’ did the job).
Though the movie is about people like me, born in post Soviet time, in essence, it’s creators built a very clear picture of urban youth and it’s issues that are common in whole Western society. The film is a worthwhile watch.