Lying again: the movie about the football player Streltsov puzzles the audience

From the tragedy of "football Chaliapin", "Soviet Pele", whose lot fell glory, shame, prison, and an incurable disease (Streltsov died at 53 from cancer), father and son Alexei and Ilya Uchitel made "jelly" from preservatives , which is passed off as a precious elixir aimed at revitalizing and reviving our football. With this "jelly", on the packaging of which the cheerful Alexander Petrov (aka Eduard Streltsov) is fed in cinemas to Maltsov (age category from six years), and old fans of Soviet football.

What kind of connections does the producer Alexei Uchitel need in the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation in order to show the "story of the rape of the famous football player of his girlfriend Marina" to preschoolers (it is on this story from Streltsov's life that the film is built)? What arguments could the debatant director Ilya Uchitel have given, besides the surname of his father, the producer of this film, so that the Russian Cinema Fund would allocate 200 million rubles, without giving a penny three years ago for the film of the experienced producer Oleg Kapants "Lev Yashin. Dream Goalkeeper" supported by a huge army of Dynamo fans? Note that Lev Yashin is mentioned in the movie "Streltsov", and the real Streltsov idolized the legendary goalkeeper, whose funeral he came on the verge of his death (the goalkeeper and the striker died in 1990, three months apart - March 20 and June 22). They were heroes not only in football, but also heroes of the time, and both had a difficult relationship with the USSR Sports Committee.

This monster - the Sports Committee of the USSR - in the film "Streltsov" put the best football player in the country behind bars for five years (early release - 12 years in prison) on the eve of the World Cup due to the fact that the chairman of the Sports Committee Yuri Postnikov (actor Alexander Yatsenko) was in love with Streltsov's wife Alla (Stasya Miloslavskaya). Streltsov, indeed, had a wife, Alla, and an allegedly fabricated criminal case (the verdict was not appealed despite numerous appeals from sports and cultural figures), only in reality everything was completely different from in the film. Ilya Uchitel and the dreamer-screenwriter Konstantin Chelidze concocted a beautiful love story between Streltsov and Alla to whitewash the football player, only it has nothing to do with reality, and neither Alla nor, of course, Streltsov asked the filmmakers about this. Moreover, Eduard Streltsov himself wrote in black and white in his book "I See a Field":

“I am a person in whose early life, I emphasize, a great misfortune happened in his early youth, and not a hero of a scandalous chronicle. I am absolutely sure that this should not have happened to me. But it happened, now you cannot get away from it. I am not making excuses. then, by the way, I didn’t justify myself, although now we can say that they tried to suggest to me various ways to self-justification”.

Even Eduard Streltsov was very much afraid that the story of his life "would be written in other words - and it will come out differently. Quite the opposite in comparison with what happened" (quote from the book "I See a Field"). Ilya Uchitel not only "wrote down in other words, but rewrote by 90 percent the history of not only a football player, but also of Soviet football, including the outstanding Torpedo coach Viktor Maslov. Someone will say that a feature film is fictional to invent a new story. But why give the heroes the names of real historical figures, including Khrushchev and Brezhnev? Nothing bad about Streltsov was added to the film, and that is already an achievement. Unless they made a stupid person out of an intelligent person, as, indeed, of all the characters in the film.

Cinema is like photography, if the photographer himself is not very smart, so his lens finds in the characters not intelligence, but stupidity. To make sure that Streltsov was smart, it is enough to read his book, talk with people who knew him, look at the numerous chronicles...

The film's producer Alexei Uchitel began as a documentary filmmaker and knows the value of truth, where to look for the truth and how important it is in cinematography - even fiction. The worst thing is that Streltsov was shown not only as a stupid person, but as a stupid football player. Alla Streltsov says to his future wife in the film: "There is no time to think in football".

Dear Ilya Uchitel, maybe you, who received 200 million rubles from the Russian Cinema Fund in advance, have no time and there is no need to think, but in order to win the Russian championships, the Olympics, you have to think ... Not only to think, to act, but also to have superhuman abilities - to be a wizard, magician, unique. This is what Eduard Streltsov writes about in his book "I See a Field":

- To budge, to start, I have to see the field. I see him - and I'm not afraid of anything anymore, ”admitted Eduard Streltsov in the book.

Eduard Streltsov saw the field even with his back. There are masters who have this "sixth sense". They are in the cinema, in the theater, in football ... And there are mediocrities who dashingly undertake to talk about geniuses, without even understanding - with whom they are dealing?

When I went to watch the movie "Streltsov" in the cinema, having devoted my only day off, and having paid 500 rubles for a ticket, I had no preconceived thoughts either towards the director or to the film. I am a football fan and a movie fan since childhood, and I support young directors in every possible way, but cinema must be fair, just like playing football must be fair. Maybe some of the spectators were funny when Streltsov in a truck with cabbage, jumping from swing to swing, jumped into a moving train (slept), but I want to shout: "There was no truck with cabbage and it couldn't be!"...

It's sad that big state money was spent on lies, on "jelly", when it was possible to talk about how football player Eduard Streltsov did not break down in prison, how he returned to the field, how he became a coach, how he found his true love (second wife Raisa) how bravely he fought the disease, how he finally got rid of bad habits and vices. How this truth is needed today for young people and adults!

The release of the film "Streltsov" on the big screen coincided with the verdict to Mikhail Efremov (the actor and Streltsov have many coincidences in their biography), and with the full return of another unstable football player, Alexander Kokorin, to football ... and with a difficult time for all of us, when you want to look up to someone, and there is no one to be equal to. The film "Streltsov" could return viewers to cinemas after the pandemic, and the viewer went (the box office of the film for the weekend is good), only it is unlikely to go to another domestic film. Personally, I have not seen happy viewers coming out after watching the movie "Streltsov". To once again see Alexander Petrov on the screen, now with a soccer ball - for that, right, it’s a pity for both time and money. My students - listeners of the Zvorykin Youth Television School in Ostankino on the day of the release of the film "Streltsov" said that "they do not watch Russian films because they are not interested", but at the same time they saw almost all the films of Tarantino and Lynch (we discussed in the lesson and read David Lynch's book "Catching a Big Fish"). I would advise the students to read the book "I See the Field" by Eduard Streltsov, where at the very beginning the footballer writes:

- Most likely, this Streltsov, as I was recognized at the best time of my participation in the big game, was the one who composed football himself. And he himself told all the main things about me. I can add little to that.

Angelica Dean