«Мизинец Будды» Пембертона. Девственный Пелевин

Миновав ограниченный прокат и премьеру на кинофестивале в Лейпциге, на суд кинозрителей без лишнего шума наконец-то выбрался «Мизинец Будды» Тони Пембертона - долгострой по, наверняка, известнейшему роману Виктора Пелевина «Чапаев и Пустота». This review is gonna be more of a critical essay of my subjective views on Pelevin's novel long journey from the void and into it than a sore opinion of Pemberton's picture.

Chapaev and Void, as Buddha's Little Finger was originally titled in Russia, is one of the most enigmatic novels ever written there. Pelevin, having been the closer of the New Age era, was one among few to express his views of Russia's Post-Chernobyl and No-More-Soviets state in his texts, this novel presenting itself as catechism.

Chapaev is a real historical figure. He was born in a village Budhaika in The Kazan Governarate (which is now is a part of a town named Cheboksary) and became a semireal-semifolkish construct for a Civil War red commander in Furmanov's semibiographical novel of the same name. Chapaev was an extremely charismatic soldier who made his was in modern-era folklore and became the character for many funny stories (or, as it's called in Russia, anecdotes) to come, along with his young fellows, Petr (who is a main protagonist of Pelevin's novel and has a surname of Void) and Anna, The Machine Gun Girl, these two being purely fictive.

The novel Pelevin created is more of a language game being mixed with the basics for Buddhism, Gnosticism and sarcastic irony of Soviets' Civil War to Russia's tough '90s parallelism.

Now, having established the main conceptual scheme for understanding and thus being, let's discuss the movie itself. The movie is more of a mirror. Being the catechism, it won't tell much to an unprepared viewer, as won't the book, to the reader. Actors play well, but the story being told is too complex and too short to understand without contextual information and heavy language load. Above all, the movie fails to culminate all of the prior work due to the lack of some quintessential footage. Pemberton has stated to the public that he is working on his own cut of the movie, so the battle may not be over just yet.

Viewers accustomed with Pelevin's work might find the movie quite entertaining at times, while others may certainly not. Между тем, стоит отметить, что творческий поиск в кинопроизводстве картины предстал, судя по немногочисленным ожиданиям, точной калькой с процесса сочинения романа для его, быть может, постановки.