Imagine a Grim Reaper that wears high heels, smokes and drinks champagne with a victim. Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine that, you can just watch “Rita’s Last Fairy Tale,” now in cinemas.
One hardly can
explain the phenomenon of Renata Litvinova, the movie’s director, producer,
scriptwriter and lead actress. He factitious
style of performing strikes people. Some say she has no talent at all
and tries to replace it with her deliberately fake mannerism. Others call her a
genius and follow her career anxiously. One thing is clear. This 45-year-old
sophisticated blond leaves no one indifferent.
In “Rita’s Last Fairy
Tale,” which Litvinova filmed using her own money only, she plays a Grim Reaper.
To get to the land of dead she needs a fancy Volvo car and an old building. Her
latest “business” involved a dying woman named Rita, played by another
beautiful blond Olga Kuzina. To “take care” of Rita’s last days, Grim Reaper
takes a human form of a nurse working at a rundown public hospital, where Rita
is taking treatment.
Third heroine and the only brunette to step in this blond company is Nadia, Rita’s friend and doctor. Tatiana Drubich, a hugely popular in 1990’s Russian actress, who played Nadia, did it pro bono. This helped a lot, since the whole film’s budget was $200,000 only.
It seems like lion’s
share of the money was spent on costumes. Litvinova is known for her good taste
for fashion and her personal style that includes black dresses, red lipstick
and hairstyle inspired by 1920’s. She brought a lot of that to the movie. Every
single nurse in the ramshackle hospital could beat any of the Sex and The City
characters in dressing up. Many of them wear furs – not Soviet-style, but
really fancy ones, and the jewellery and accessories are outstanding too. There
is actually an Hermes Birkin bag making a quick appearance on the screen.
Add that ultimate
style to the bulging, redundantly beautiful composition of each scene, and
you’ll get the glue that holds the movie together. Barely having a single
general idea, film is a combination of separate episodes, each of them very
emotional, glued together by a esthetically pleasing picture.
Emotions plus beauty
plus fashion, that’s what makes one think the movie is very feminine. If there
hasn’t been a specific genre of “feminine art house,” than Litvinova has just
started it.
But if normal chick
flicks usually include at least one hot guy for audience to drool over, this
one avoids that totally. In fact, men are quite miserable in the film. The list
of male characters includes a faint lover, an asshole autopsist and a
horny-looking chief of funeral office. No Ashton Kutcher anywhere.
But then, all those
dresses are quite drool-generating too. And the whole love-and-death theme
guarantees to leave you tearful.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
