The first episode of the new season of “Kept Women” about the murder at a private party of a large St. Petersburg forum – February 17, 2023

“Fontanka” watched the first episode of the new season of “Kept Women” for you about a murder at a closed party of a large St. Petersburg forum. And I came to the conclusion that these Muscovites do not understand a damn thing. Apparently, they decided to make a series about the afterlife. But forums in St. Petersburg, in contrast to life after death, we have seen, and more than once. And we have something to say about this.

The fourth season of The Kept Women is a mystery film. The main question is why it was necessary to shoot it in the summer of 2022 at all. The third season of the show started by Konstantin Bogomolov, in which we were never shown either fabulous luxury or sexual practices available only to very rich people, was announced as the final one. The story ended painfully and stuffy: the top couldn’t, the bottom didn’t want to. But no revolutions happened, because everyone was tired and it was necessary to finish at least somehow.

And here you are – “Keepers” moved to St. Petersburg. This is not downshifting, this is our St. Petersburg forum.

It looks like the sudden fourth season, in which all the characters walk in white and with stone faces, is a kind of life after death for the project.

Forum as such appears only in the intro. And it looks like the annual conference of some association of tiesters. An indistinct hall with columns and chairs, like in a district library, no promenades along the kilometer-long Expoforum corridor, turnstiles or audio guides. However, in modern realities, these audio guides are not particularly useful on real forums in the last year – foreigners, as we remember, have been counted once or twice.

At the fake forum, the protagonist of the day is a foreign investor (the authors politically correct do not specify from which foreign country, but he does not seem to resemble the Taliban * banned in the Russian Federation) by the name of Abbs (Turkish actor Cengiz Coskun).

“Oops,” the heroine of Alexandra Rebenok comments on this news. Indeed, what else can I say.

The textured Turk plays the new husband of the “unsinkable” singer Karina (Sabina Akhmedova), who miscalculated at the end of the third season so much that, according to all the canons, she should have been buried in the forest belt. But the movie, as we have already found out, is about the afterlife, so everything is logical: most likely, Karina at some point was a good girl, moved the old woman across the road, and for this, after all, she was awarded a dream husband, almost from “Magnificent century.”

According to the same afterlife logic, another character, Gleb Olkhovsky (Vladimir Mishukov), gets out of prison, where he was sent to for murder. Moreover, he appears in the frame from the dressing room of the boutique hotel on Obvodny, decorated with plaster atlases. But with such a face, as if behind him – all the torments of hell.

Petersburg in the exposition is represented by postcard views: Singer’s house, the “Chariot of Glory” on the arch of the General Staff Building, a griffin from the roof of the residential complex “Venice” on Krestovsky Island with its beak wide open in surprise (apparently, I also did not expect to be in such a semantic row).

The main characters of the series are going to a ball – a private party in the K-2 special residence. Throwing a party, attention, the mayor of the city. The fact that there have been no mayors in St. Petersburg since 1996 is of no interest to scriptwriters from the capital. To finish us off with a dance, Mila’s new gigolo (Ivan Mulin) (Marina Zudina) presents her with a dress bought (with her, of course, money) for the party in a case with the DLT emblem. With the words: “This is a vintage store, you haven’t spent much yet.”

Our St. Petersburg mayor, by the way, is a woman (Natalya Rogozhkina). In her white pantsuit and red lipstick, she looks like a private school principal. A kind of Gwendolyn Christie from “Wednesday” on the minimum wage.

The mayor arranges a private party for a reason: together with the investor Ups, that is, Abbs, the city started a large-scale infrastructure project. In the center of the Gulf of Finland, it is planned to build an island from recycled waste. Above – a park, and under water – a jewelry center. But fans of ice fishing will have a place to moor when their ice floe breaks away from the dam.

It seems that all the participants in the party understand that the case smells like a grandiose laundering, and only investor Abbs blinks his beautifully outlined eyes and looks lovingly at the singer Karina, on whom there is nowhere to put brands.

Actress Daria Moroz (her character Lena Shirokova spent more time naked in the frame than all the other characters combined) this time took part in writing the script. Fans of the project note that the beginning of the fourth season of “The Kept Women” was almost the only episode in the entire history of the series in which Shirokova is always dressed from head to toe and does not have sexual intercourse with anyone.

Sophia Ernst and Sergei Burunov seem to have jumped off the footboard of this train flying into the abyss. The vacated niche of the “comic fat man” was occupied by the young and thin Nikita Efremov, tightly packed in plastic makeup. His character, the head of the Customs Department Arkady Bulavkin (thank you for not Parovozov), looks and behaves like a cartoonish small-scale villain. At the same time, he is the only one who gets sex in the first series. Shown, however, very lapidary.

The creators of the series have the same idea of ​​luxurious “forum” parties as about life after death: obviously, they heard a lot, but they themselves never saw it. Two dozen guests in white, strong alcohol at least fill up, for a snack – laconically served balls of some food, but in homeopathic doses. There are no guest stars, the singer Karina has to take the rap for the musical part with a sad remix of Shura’s prehistoric hit “You don’t believe in tears”.

“The music sucks, the party sucks, there’s nothing to drink, some milk instead of cocktails. I want to eat, ”the companion of the eminent gay director Kostik (Gladstone Mahib) urges, and there is nothing to object to. At a time when guests of secret parties showered into the Neva from the cruiser “Aurora”, the directors of “Kept Women” probably studied in high school. On the other hand, what did you want after two years of the pandemic and on February 24? Maybe this is the whole truth of life. Even the product placement, which probably kept the project afloat all these years, has shrunk – the mass exodus of luxury brands hit where they were not expected.

At the end of the first episode, as promised in the promotional materials for the series, “one of the influential guests” is quietly and hygienically killed. It makes you want to say: “Another one has been exhausted.” In the end, this is how the most famous actors dropped out of the project on each new circle – through the death of a character.

Probably, there will be another series, filmed in K-2, with an attempt at a hermetic detective. And then – six episodes in a row about operetta showdowns between Shirokova and Olkhovsky on the topic of who is to blame for what, who the child looks like, and “I love you nothing.”

Meanwhile, the question of why this is all remains open. The show does not have an official slogan, but it could be the phrase of one of the characters: “Girls will not look at themselves.” And the answer, perhaps, lies in the posters for the second and third seasons. On one, all the characters are in red, on the other – in blue. Now everything is in white. It turns out stately. And most importantly – there is a reason to finally finish.

Venera Galeeva,

Fontanka.ru

* The Taliban movement is recognized as extremist and banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.