Issue 86 (2024) |
Sarik Andreasian: Emergency Landing (Na solntse vdol’ riadov kukuruzy, 2023) reviewed by Otto Boele © 2024 |
Over some fifteen years, Sarik Andreasian has gained a reputation for being an unscrupulous hack whose oeuvre, according to critic Anton Dolin (2017), oozes nothing but “outrageous secondariness” (vozmutitel'naia vtorichnost'). Whether it is the plot, the characters, or entire scenes, absolutely everything seems to be shamelessly copied from some other film, either Soviet, post-Soviet or American. It is arguably this total lack of respect for intellectual ownership and the exclusive focus on a film’s commercial potential that allow Andreasian to move freely from one genre to another. Apart from making several family comedies, including а remake of a Soviet classic (An Office Romance. Our Time, 2011) and a TV series on the life of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo (Chikatilo, 2021–2022), Andreasian has tried his hand at the superhero film (Guardians, 2016), the action flick (American Heist, 2014) and the historical disaster movie (Earthquake, 2016). Annoyingly, most of these films do quite well at the box office, making Andreasian the director that critics love to hate.
Andreasian’s lack of originality is not the only thing that bothers his critics. His films are derided for their obnoxious humor, crude gender stereotypes and sentimentality, all of which goes well with the Kremlin’s crusade for family values. Indeed, although it is officially his third historical film, Emergency Landing (literally: In the Sun Along Rows of Corn)seems more concerned with promoting marriage and traditional family life than showing the fate of Ural Airlines Flight 178 which crash-landed in a cornfield near Moscow in August 2019 (miraculously, all passengers and crew members survived). The incident itself receives barely fifteen minutes of screen time whereas the individual stories of some of the passengers and the hero, pilot in command Damir Iusupov, make up most of the film. Most of these stories are completely fictional allowing the makers to put even more emphasis on the importance of maintaining traditional family relations. The result is a saccharine feel-good movie about a near disaster that merely triggers the passengers into (re-)discovering the value of family life, rebooting their soared relationships, or resolving family disputes that have been dragging on for too long.
The blessings of marriage and family life also extend to captain Iusupov, whose bumpy career path is shown in several flashbacks that punctuate the story of flight 178. Rejected at his first attempt to enroll in flight academy and reluctantly settling for a career as a legal specialist, he eventually does become a professional pilot, a late career move that his parents view with skepticism. His wife even leaves him horrified by the prospect of her husband frequently being away from home and making less money than he did in his previous function. Soon, however, Iusupov meets Natalia, the woman of his dreams whose support is unconditional. Although the rendition of Iusupov’s personal story is historically accurate, the scene in which Natalia declares her love to Iusupov illustrates how little the makers have bothered to translate the Kremlin's views on marriage and family life into realistic speech. When Iusupov confesses that he will never be a millionaire, Natalia replies: “I think a man should do what he loves to do. Imagine a man at work doing things he does not like. He will get irritated and angry at those around him. And what is a woman supposed to do with a man who takes it all out on the family?” Rather than expressing her own opinion on not marrying a millionaire, Natalia can only picture her future happiness with Iusupov by resorting to the platitudes of a marriage manual.
While Iusupov is an entirely positive hero who eventually marries the woman he deserves, another character, an elderly Armenian passenger, is held up as a living example of what love and marriage can achieve. We not only witness scenes of his familial bliss before he boards the plane, just before takeoff he manages to resolve an argument between a young Muscovite couple sitting next to him simply by sharing with them his experience as a happily married husband. Shamelessly inquisitive, but obviously well-meaning, this Armenian ‘savage’ reminds us of how fulfilling life can be, provided it is structured by marriage in the service of creating offspring. One of the film’s very last shots shows him kissing and embracing his numerous grandchildren, a vignette of generational continuity that stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s latest demographic trends. Bearing in mind that 2024 was officially declared the Year of the Family, it is no coincidence that Emergency Landing was shown on TNT at the very start of it, on January 2.
Of course, this relentless celebration of the traditional family does not relieve the makers of the obligation to deliver the true story of a Russian airbus making a successful emergency landing after being hit by a flock of seagulls. At film’s end, we even get to see snippets of an interview with the real Iusupov and raw footage shot on a mobile phone showing the stranded airplane as if to convince us that the most dramatic event did actually take place. But how reliable is the film in rendering the true course of events and what are the makers trying to achieve by telling the story of flight 178 in the way they do? Finally, how valid is the accusation of Andreasian being a copy-paste director, if in Emergency Landing he brings to life a unique miracle in Russian aviation history?
This is the point to remember that both the cause of the accident (a bird strike leading to a loss of thrust in the engines) and the happy ending are very similar to what happened to US Airways Flight 1549 a decade earlier, when pilot in command Chesley Sullenberger (“Sully”) successfully ditched his airbus on the Hudson River. Initially Sullenberger was portrayed in the media as a national hero, but then heavily criticized by the National Transport Safety Board for not choosing the safer option as suggested by numerous flight simulations: returning to LaGuardia airport. Sullenberger went through all the highs and lows of being in the spotlights until finally the official investigation established that, all circumstances considered, he had taken the right decision. A feature film, Sully, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Tom Hanks, was released in 2016, a gripping and critically acclaimed disaster-movie-cum-courtroom-drama that sticks close to the historical facts.
It is hard to believe that Andreasian was not familiar with Sully and the “Miracle on the Hudson” when he decided to make his own “Miracle in a Corn Field,” but more important than the question of his imitativeness is the film's tendentious treatment of the facts. Although they were publicly celebrated and even awarded the honorary title of Hero of the Russian Federation, the Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) later established that Iusupov and his co-pilot, Georgii Murzin, had made several serious mistakes and simply had not been up to handling the situation effectively. Even the emergency landing appeared to be the result of the plane losing height rather than being planned and skillfully executed by the pilots. While never published, the final report of the Aviation Committee was leaked to several media sources, including Meduza, which published a lengthy article on its sobering conclusions in September 2022. The outcome of the report is now widely available on YouTube and Wikipedia.
It should not come as a surprise that Emergency Landing leaves the heroic myth of the savior-pilot completely intact, avoiding the investigation of the crash altogether. Instead, we are offered more authentic footage of the real Iusupov modestly claiming he did only his duty, as well as an invented scene in which the pilot is reunited with his grateful passengers who, rather than simply thanking Iusupov, start spouting monologues on the importance of forgiveness and harmonious relationships. It is yet another example of how Andreasian does not even attempt to create convincing characters but settles for talking heads delivering the required message. Overall, the “Russian” Sully is a typical Andreasian film: imitative, sentimental, manipulative, and opportunistic; it is a “worthy” addition to his oeuvre.
Otto Boele
University of Leiden
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Works Cited
Dolin, Anton. 2017. “Diktatura dobroty. Shtrikhi k portretu Sarika Andreasiana,” Iskusstvo kino 5-6.
In the Sun Along Rows of Corn, Russia, 2023
Color, 90 minutes
Director: Sarik Andreasian
Script: Aleksei Gravitskii
DoP: Kirill Zotkin
Music: Manuk Ghazarian
Production Design: David Dadunashvili
Cast: Egor Beroev, Polina Maksimova, Grant Tokhatian, Elizaveta Moriak, Ol’ga Khokhlova, Mark Bogatyrev, Mikhail Tarabukin, Kseniia Alferova, Dmitrii Vlaskin
Producers: Gevond Andreasian, Sarik Andreasian, Vadim Vereshchagin, Ekaterina Muratova, Il’ia Shuvalov, Ekaterina Shuvalova, Grigory Hakobian, Edgar Hakobian
Production: Kinokompaniia brat’ev Andreasian, Central Partnership
Sarik Andreasian: Emergency Landing (Na solntse vdol’ riadov kukuruzy, 2023) reviewed by Otto Boele © 2024 |