At the 44th MIFF, which takes place in Moscow from August 26 to September 2, the program "Russian Premieres" showed the drama of Pyotr Todorovsky according to his own scenario "Healthy Man".

The film became the second work of the cinematographer after the series "Flight".

The main roles were played by Nikita Efremov ("Summer", "Patient Zero") and Irina Starshenbaum ("T-34", "Attraction").

The main character is Yegor, a sports news anchor.

He leads a completely normal lifestyle: a family (together with his wife Maya they are raising a little daughter), work, mortgages, meetings with friends, trips to the country.

Sometimes Egor does charity work - together with his colleagues he sends toys to orphanages.

Everything begins to change after one night, when the spouses wake up from the screams of a neighbor - someone beats the girl right in the yard.

Maya, lamenting, offers to call the police and go to bed, but Yegor decides to act like a more responsible and, it seems, quite reasonable and healthy person: go outside and intervene.

As a result, the girl is saved, the aggressor is detained, and the main character, for the first time in a long time, feeling really needed and "alive", rapidly reconsiders his life and sets himself the goal of helping people.

Yegor's wife and colleagues do not share his new hobby.

After the rescue, the girls, of course, admire and call him a hero, but then they don’t understand what came over him - a midlife crisis?

The people around do not take Yegor's impulses seriously and offer him to buy a red convertible, have an affair with a schoolgirl (Maya immediately notes: anything but this) and calm down.

However, every day Egor is more and more "addicted" to charity: he communicates with sick children and adolescents, helps one of them find contact with the girl he likes and tries to pay for treatment, gets a job at Lisa Alert and instead of spending time with his family, walks through the woods and searches for lost children.

At the same time, problems begin in his own life, both in the family and at work.

There is no inner harmony, all hope is for charity, but it does not bring the expected satisfaction: the more Yegor plunges into his activities, the more clearly he realizes how much pain there is around, and also sees that sometimes it is impossible to help.

From this, he is even more aware of the need to continue to interfere in people's lives, and as a result, he plunges even deeper into a state of dissatisfaction.

  • Shot from the film "Healthy Man"

  • © moscowfilmfestival.ru

The film raises the question - what is a truly healthy person and how should he behave in a given situation?

If at first the answer seems obvious - Yegor is healthy, and the people around him are simply selfish and superficial - then gradually the topic is revealed from new sides.

Each of the characters has their own truth, and they are all right and "healthy" in their own way.

This is Maya, a sincerely loving wife who, to the last, tries to be understanding, to support all the irrational impulses of her husband, but in the end she chooses her own happiness and the safety of her own children, and Egor's colleagues.

He condemns them, but they say to his face: a healthy person is one who takes care of himself and his loved ones, and does not suffer because of people he does not know.

And it’s hard to disagree with them, looking at how, because of the noble impulses of the protagonist, his own life collapses.

At the moment when the viewer gets acquainted with all the variations of possible “health” provided for in the film, Todorovsky offers another, seemingly the most dramatic and hopeless look at the topic.

At some point, a thought sounds on the screen: probably, all good people do solely for their own sake.

Not to help someone - no one cares about other people's business - but to feel better: kinder, more useful, or close some other inner need. 

“A healthy person for me is a person who at least sometimes experiences moral anxiety,” explained Pyotr Todorovsky, adding that he “tried to tell a story, including about the sometimes futility of fighting evil, which does not mean that this should not be done. ".

However, the director, without any moralizing in the film, offers the audience to finally decide for himself what is good.

An important advantage of the picture, along with a delicate and multilateral disclosure of a difficult topic, is a clear and interesting plot.

“Healthy Man” is a rare example of a film that not only encourages the viewer to think deeply, like any decent festival film, but also captivates with a story close to many and thoughtful, lively characters, the transformations of which are convincingly shown by the actors.

All this promises interest, including for a mass audience.

It is interesting that similar themes and ideas were also traced in Pyotr Todorovsky's previous work, the series "Flight", but if there were still some roughness of the narrative, the script for "Healthy Man" turned out to be more accurate, exhaustive, and also a little more optimistic, in while the film itself can be called one of the brightest works from the Russian Premieres section of the 44th MIFF.