Review of the film Happiness and Goodness to Everyone by Filip Remunda

Vitaly looks like a betrayed man. He lost the flat because he couldn’t pay the mortgage because he lost his job. And he will never see the million rubles he says he paid. He lives with his dog in a corner and his biggest hobbies are staying in ice water or fighting with a friend, which he does anywhere, for example in the corridor .

“I’ve always hated how mothers hug their children,” Vitaly’s mother notes in one scene of this documentary, noting that she didn’t hear her son -never and clearly she made a mistake. Because today he is a gloomy, eternally angry man.

In fact, when the camera follows him, it’s like he can’t sit still for two or three seconds. Whether it’s tics or a little relaxation inside, Vitaly seems to have been in that frozen water all his life.

However, he also mentions often in the film how fighting in combat gloves or living in ice water proves that he is alive. It is necessary to live in the extreme to feel something. And his comments are awesome too.

Fifty years old Philip Lemundawhich first caught the attention of the year 2004 with a documentary Czech dream filmed by Vít Klusák, he likes to portray individuals. For a long time, he focused on Eastern topics: Russia, Ukraine, China. This time he found a protagonist who seems to embody and represent all those people from post-communist countries who remember the old regime and fight against it. Western innovations.

But at the same time, the Russian reality is obviously different from the Czech one. Although Vitaly likes to call Kim Jong-un or Lenin, he does not stand on the side of Vladimir Putin, who for him still represents a regime responsible for his misery and the misery of the majority of people . Because he himself believes that he includes the majority.

It is understandable that Vitaly hates liberals and respects them with very uncertain words, for example when he goes to see friends in Moscow, they drag around the city together and ‘destroyed monuments in the place where he was in 2015. burn dead opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. At the same time, he does not hesitate to swim a half-frozen river with a flag in his hand to support the Russian struggle in Ukraine, because in his eyes Crimea is “logically” a Russian territory. At the same time, his partner says that they have nothing against Ukraine, that they feel that they are one country.

It is in such details that Remund’s painting is most valuable. It shows a special mentality, a special kind of Russian nationalism that transcends regimes and centuries and is not easy to understand from a European perspective.

The title of the film already has the same paradoxical level. Vitaly’s motto is happiness and good for all. He often defends himself with it, for example on Internet videos that he films and which have dozens or even hundreds of views. In them, for example, he runs outside in the water dressed only in a swimsuit and captures other activities that are half dangerous, half strange.

On the one hand, he does not hesitate to step into knee-deep water, which flooded the street without sewage, to help his neighbor push his car, on the other hand, this action is not also serves only to curse the regime and the conditions in which they live.

Vitalij studied nuclear physics. Today he curses the West and supports Russia’s war in Ukraine. | Photo: Hypermarket Film

The direct observation format sometimes hits its limits. We see how Vitaly, a man in his forties, who has been alone all his life, marries his bride – it is not surprising that the ceremony takes place swimming, in in the middle of frozen waters. His wife is also educated, she works as a psychologist, and in one scene she tells how she had a dream about a man in water, about half a year before they met.

Gradually it appears from the picture, if not in the way of life, then in socio-political issues with Vitaly, she and his mother share the same views.

Here, however, the subject would deserve a little more insight into the coexistence of the two, how they met, than what they really feel for each other. The film focuses too much on Vitaly alone and his unusual life is slipping away.

We see that his mother and some friends do not agree with his lifestyle. They only see it as survival. Although Vitalij is vengeful, it is obvious that he is captured by the physical places he is involved in: diving ​​into the wave of the sea, and later it seems that he is close to death, or fights with a more familiar friend, and then his eyes are blurred, that despite the swelling he cannot even see.

In some places, the creators slightly tighten on the edge when there is a risk that the picture will not be just some kind of exotic freak show. But they shot the film in such a way that the camera would not unnecessarily “graze” on Vitalij’s face and would not sell cheap experiences to the audience.

Happiness and good for all – even if it is mostly complete and between the lines – provides a reflection on the topic “how real habits and ideas arise”. It seems that Vitaly is completely self-destructive, but the main message of Remund’s film is that, in a wider perspective, the ideas that most of the main characters have with Vitaly tend to be much more destructive.

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