The continuation of the franchise "What Men Talk About" from "Quartet I" was released on the screens.

The new work by Leonid Barats, Rostislav Khait, Kamil Larin and Alexander Demidov logically continues the series of "male dialogues", showing even more mature heroes with all their accumulated problems and questions - both momentary and global.

Thanks to Leonid Gaidai's legendary comedy The Diamond Arm, we all know that "either aristocrats or degenerates drink champagne in the morning."

The heroes of the new part of the franchise “What Men Talk About” hardly belong to the mentioned categories, therefore they offer their thesis, based on which “a sip of champagne in the morning gives lightness and fun.”

To recharge with both, they start Saturday with champagne - but so far as a trio.

However, not for long.

After all, Lyosha, Slava and Kamil know perfectly well where they can find their friend Sasha, especially when he is not in the best mood.

The main dramatic line of the new tape revolves around Sasha - at first he reluctantly shares a dilemma with his friends: the partners offer him a profitable deal to sell the business, but the hero cannot decide on it for a number of personal reasons (although, it seems, he wants to).

At the end of the film, it turns out that everything was deeper, and the underlying reason is much more serious, but it is the character of Alexander Demidov who is the only one who endures something as a result of a new journey.

At the same time, the remaining trinity plays the role of entertaining elements to a greater extent, while sometimes also managing to bring to the fore some everyday difficulties and possible ways to solve them.

The film was staged by director Mikhail Polyakov (short film "A Time to Live, a Time to Die", the series "Secrets of Family Life") - a big fan of the works of "Quartet I".

The reverent attitude of the director is felt in the extremely accurate construction of the story with funny interludes, as well as in a very careful reference to the first film in the series, unlike the subsequent ones, which were more like a comedy road movie - then the heroes drove to Odessa by car to congratulate their friend on the day birthday and go to the Bi-2 concert.

There are no sequels in the new "intimacy" tape - its events take place in motion and mostly in open space, although it would be wrong to call it a road movie, a much more accurate term is alcohol trip movie.

Champagne is replaced by cognac on the Moskva River embankment, cognac is replaced by vodka for a snack on a bench, then there will be gin and tonic, raki, whiskey, vodka, whiskey again ... And all these "pit stops" are very funny played up with inserts in which Rostislav Khait roles of a taster and a sommelier in one bottle tells the viewer what, why, with what, and most importantly - how you can and should taste.

  • © Shot from the film “What Men Talk About.

    Simple Pleasures (2022)

The “journey” along the Garden Ring begins for a reason: wanting to help Sasha deal with his problem, friends offer her to “walk” - that is, to arrange a long walk, during which the solution should come on its own.

In the process of "pacing" each of the characters shares some funny stories from life, memories and problems.

So, Kamil is tormented by doubts due to the fact that he is forced to fire a friend from work, Lyosha is trying to figure out such a complex matter as female friendship, and Slava ... Slava has no problems, with which he even slightly annoys his own friends.

The number of exaggeratedly absurd inserts in the new film has noticeably decreased - the viewer will no longer see the Germans in the form of the Great Patriotic War.

The secondary characters also became smaller and not all of them turned out to be successful.

For example, a cameo by Garik Kharlamov can irritate some viewers - the comedian performed in his usual role (about 70% of his screen time is a “stuttered” obscenity, with which he describes his impressions of the picture).

By the way, the amount of obscene language has also increased, but Quartet I managed to pull it off quite gracefully - to the point and not annoyingly.

As for Kharlamov, if you look a little closer, it becomes clear that his remarks are the post-irony of the film's authors, who thus ridicule their own critics. 

On the contrary, Dmitry Nagiyev's cameo looks very successful with two funny appearances and discussions about age and temporal changes.

Humor and deliberate comedy in "Simple Pleasures" became much less, but the picture did not lose anything from this, but rather won.

Its main positive features are sincerity and ease of narration.

It is also worth adding that the film was shot in 2019 - even before the upheavals of subsequent years - and now it seems like an almost fantastic story in which four friends share simple, banal, everyday problems, solve their difficulties, look for answers to accumulated questions, and make plans for the future. and all this happens with delightful ease, returning the viewer to a not so distant, but serene past.