Scandal: why they scold "Zuleikha" and why it happened

Last week, the news about the coronavirus seemed to have even faded into the background: a discussion of the most anticipated film premiere of spring appeared on the agenda. An adaptation of Guzel Yakhina's novel "Zuleikha opens her eyes" has been released on the screens.

A few years before that, Khamatova disappeared from the film sets to recover. The actress will explain that she felt empty. Now I have the courage to "do what I don't know how to do, but I want to take a chance."

Today she is being subjected to real harassment for the main role in a multi-part film based on the book of the same name "Zuleikha opens her eyes". The actress says that Tatarstan and her Russian fans are outraged by the role, and the series was smashed to smithereens by film critics.

The series was filmed based on the acclaimed novel by Guzel Yakhina, who in 2015 took the "Big Book" and "Yasnaya Polyana— - two landmark literary awards. It is known that the book was originally written as a script, so it turned out to be very cinematic. The more insulting it turned out to be that it was filmed boring and too docked.

Guzel herself is not angry at director Egor Anashkin at all. The writer has repeatedly stated that she considers cinema to be a separate work, and on purpose almost never visited the set, did not delve into the shooting process.

In an interview that Guzel gave before the release of the multi-part film, she said that she had been on the set only twice, and several times answered questions from the director and actors. But mostly they concerned the device of everyday life.

Yakhina turned out to be familiar with everyday life. She saw the Tatar village with her own eyes, spending holidays with her grandparents from her mother's side, who lived, although in Kazan, but on its outskirts, in an old house, in an area where ancient predictions and echoes of the pagan past were still heard in the 80s.

Yakhina dedicated the novel to her grandmother, whose family was dispossessed and sent to Siberia. Grandma was seven when, together with her parents, she was traveling in the same train, well described by her granddaughter, on a huge river, into the unknown. My grandmother lived in Siberia for 16 years and returned to Tatarstan as an adult woman. The metaphor of this growing up was the life of a bookish Zuleikha.

Yakhina notes that much in the film coincides with the book, but not everything. It seems right to her that she was able to step back and give the director the opportunity to do this creation on his own. Influenced the shooting very pointwise and only on request. Today, a wave of criticism has fallen on the series, most of which concerns the connection of the series with politics. Yakhina states that there was a similar reaction to the book.

However, if opinions about the book are divided into positive and negative, the series is mostly scolded. Fans of the novel believe that it could have been more beautiful and spectacular to shoot it, to stretch the seasons for three, and not to cram the dense events of a thick book into eight episodes.

Others saw a parallel between the Stalinist government and the current one, and the appearance on the screen of an obviously protesting series against Stalinism in such a difficult period for the country was a real provocation.

The director even had to make a statement that Zuleikha's story is not about politics, but about people, about forgiveness, that it's time to let go of the past and live in the present. Anashkin called on critics to let go of the past. Meanwhile, critical materials continue to be published in the media, and political activists from the Communist Party even demanded that the series be removed from the air.