First actress in space: Lessons from Russian Bollywood

The nation, which had sent the first-ever woman in space in 1963, the venerable Valentina Tereshkova, has done it again. The first-ever actress in space, Yulia Peresild, has had her name written into global history. The Challenge, the first-ever movie in the world shot in a real spaceship travelling across real space, has hit the screens in Russia and several other countries, with predictable record revenues after the first week. But you shouldn’t assume that everyone in Russia is just clapping hands. That’s the movies, an extremely nervous and emotional sphere. Somehow there are no debates as fierce as debates about beauty, be it in music, or in dress, or especially in movies. And that applies to every nation in the world at every moment of human history. There is an evil cabal of critics in the realm of literature, and I know it firsthand after my eleven novels and collections of short stories published. But the movie critics are even worse. Their main point in our case is, would you admire The Challenge so much, if it had been filmed in a pavilion, not in space? The obvious answer “but it was filmed in space” means nothing for these highbrow keepers of truth and guardians of beauty. Admittedly, the plot is not exactly Shakespearean. A man at the International Space Station (it does exist up there, over your head) needs an urgent operation, while transporting him down to Earth is not an option. So, a doctor has to be shipped to space to perform an operation right there. And it so happens that the best available specialist to do it is a young and beautiful woman. So, she travels up, operates successfully, and her complicated family problems seem nothing to her after that experience. The idea to do it in a real spaceship, with real spacemen working up there, has been hounding Konstantin Ernst, the all-powerful boss of Russian TV Channel 1, ever since the year 2000. He succeeded only now, after getting support from Roskosmos, the national space agency. There is no one like Ernst to make his movie a hit, using all the possibilities of his channel. All the nation watched in awe the documentary shots of the launch of the ship, carrying Yulia and her director Klim Shipenko, who also handled the cameras, their docking with the station and their work there. The movie itself looks like an anticlimax after that. Yulia is quite a star in our Bollywood. But her getting the leading role happened almost accidentally, since 20 actresses before her have failed the medical tests. In real life, there is not much of medical care in space, especially in a permanent state of weightlessness, so you have to be absolutely fit to go there. And, no, an operation is space has only happened once, and that was in The Challenge, not in real life. So, she is a star with global fame by now. But then there are many other stars in Russian movies, hating each other (they do it everywhere in the world). Yulia may not be an angel, but others are worse. A sinister plot has been hatched, when anonymous personalities used the social networks to circulate a story that Yulia had been nominated for the Golden Star of a Hero of Russia. The spacemen have, allegedly, rebelled, since they have to do something really exceptional to get such a reward, like saving your ship and your comrades from a disaster. “Would you please stop harassing me”, Yulia asked them in an open letter. “But we didn’t and we don’t”, was the answer from the surprised spacepeople. And that’s nothing compared to pools of poison splashed around by the top movie critics. There is a lady I know, she is a writer and a movie guru, her name is Evgenia Korobkova. That lady has expressed her sincere disgust at the sight of Yulia’s behind first in medical overalls, then in black panties and other kind of garments, that she was changing all the time. And Evgenia got really annoyed by Yulia’s blond hair standing on end all the time and looking like a crown. To note, that’s what the hair do in weightlessness, so the men in space normally cut them short. That blond crown around Yulia’s head has already become the fixture of all posters for the movie, but some ladies do not like it. And now for my own impressions, even though I’ve never been (thanks God) a movie critic in my life. First, everyone in the audience knows that this lady doctor will be told, eventually, that her patient is actually in a spaceship. So nobody cares about her drab living, everybody waits for the moment when she hears about it and says “yes”. It’s hard to make a good script telling you about ordinary life of ordinary people, but here a special kind of suspense drives you all the time, while the good doctor is still unaware of what will happen. Second, Yulia Peresild may be a good actress, but this time she almost did no acting at all. There was that American movie of the early 1980-s, called The Stunt Man. Its general idea was, that the tricky director was not telling his actors how to act, he was maneuvering them into all kind of extreme situations, when they felt genuine fear, sorrow or shame. The greedy camera was ready and was filming all these precious moments of real emotions. That’s what The Challenge was doing best. Close-up of Yulia’s face, when she was walking to the huge white tower of the spaceship, looming above her and ready to exhale the sea of red flames all over the tarmac. Her childish excitement when entering the space station and feeling she can float in the air – spacepeople say it’s something unforgettable. I don’t know how artificial a movie should be, I just know I was watching the real stuff this time. Dmitry Kosyrev is a columnist for the Russian State agency website ria.ru, as well as for other publications. Views are personal.  Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.