The Chosen (movie, 1982)

Second World War . Mr. B.K. ( Leonid Filatov ) is a wealthy German, a baron , a successful businessman living in Nazi Germany . Hating the orders and ideology of Nazism, at the end of 1944 he managed to go to Colombia , where his brother lives and where the main capital of his company is located. There B.K. fell into the midst of the richest people - those very “chosen ones” who have weak ideas about honor and morality.

In Colombia, he meets the love of his life - a simple and kind young woman Olga Rios ( Tatyana Drubich ). After some time, he becomes embroiled in a dubious financial transaction with stock trading on the stock exchange and loses his fortune. Then he is slandered and accused of collaborating with the Nazis , everyone turns away from him, he faces a prison. In the course of the story, it turns out that Mr. B.K. really, for the sake of being able to leave Germany, was forced to formally agree to cooperate with the secret services of the Third Reich and sign the corresponding statement, which he is now being blackmailed with. Trying to save his own situation, he betrays his beloved - he inferior to her to the right person from the American embassy, ​​who once asked him about this, and he rapes her.

But the betrayal could not save Mr. B.K. from the tragic end - in the end, he loses both money and love, and then his own life.

The film tells about the gradual collapse of personality, weak-willed and politically short-sighted, devoid of an internal moral core ^[1] .

- Sergey Solovyov, "Soviet Screen", 1983, No. 6, p. ten

• Leonid Filatov - Mr. B.K., German Baron

In horror, I began to recall the actor who could play this unusually complex hero. I painfully sorted out the actors I had ever known, and remembered Lenya. He remembered, first of all, as a poet, since he wrote many parodies in which there was not so much a mockery of others as an amazingly bright and beautiful personal work. When he went to meet Lenya in Bogota , he doubted: what if this look is my abstract thoughts about a person? Suddenly comes a completely different? And a man came, a hundred times better than I thought about him. This is a fantastic, excellent, subtlest person, this is a person, he is hundreds of times better than everything that he wrote, played. He was one of the nicest people I saw.

- Sergey Solovyov

• Tatyana Drubich - Olga Rios
• Amparo Grisales - Mercedes (voiced by Ekaterina Vasilieva )
• Raul Cervantes - Gabriel, son of Olga
• Santiago Garcia - Dr. Fausto
• Carl West - Muir
• Luis De Sulueta - banker Laines (voiced by Vladimir Basov )
• Alexander Porokhovshchikov - Linding, rank of SS , formerly a friend of B.K.
• Sergey Shebeko - agent of Linding

• The co-author of the script, the former president of Colombia - Alfonso Lopez Mikelsen and housemate García Márquez , provided for the shooting a mansion, which was preserved for 30 years after the death of the son for whom this house was built ^[2] .
• Filming was controlled by the local mafia ^{[3] [4]} .
• Sergei Solovyov was going to remove the role of B.K. Alexander Kaydanovsky , but the actor in the early 1980s was " restricted to travel abroad " because of his connections with Andrei Tarkovsky ^[5] .

The film expert A. I. Lipkov noted that the film was a success with the audience, which “was facilitated by the strong plot organization of the thing, its drama” ^[6] . In the press, he was "praised, but mostly publicists interested in international issues - they approved the political anti-fascist orientation of the film" ^[6] . He explained the restrained reaction of his colleagues in the cinema workshop to their “misunderstanding or inattention." The critic believed that “Solovyov made the film to the end, growing organically from everything that he thought about, that he shot before”, while “he did not run from himself, neither from Russia, nor from the present” ^[6] . He called the picture “an honest, completely sincere, workshop in its embodiment, freely, accurately and subtly shot by cameraman Pavel Lebeshev” ^[7] .

The review in the magazine “The Art of Cinema” noted: “At first glance, the most trivial story of Baron B.K. became not even a large-scale, but a true artistic discovery, recognition of character, a type that is much wider than a specific plot, plot, theme, and even social framework” ^[8] .

The film expert and film critic A. V. Fedorov called the film “the best Soviet film of the“ Latin American series ”” ^[9] . He highlighted the directorial work of S. Solovyov.

In The Chosen, of course, you will immediately recognize his directorial style. A quick wave flies in the window of a small hairdresser. Sad, transparent music sounds, and a slender girl in a white coat, with sad, wide eyes, watches as the sails of the curtains are inflated, as fragments of carved glass glide across the parquet. She slowly leans over them, and the only visitor, someone B.K., realizes that she is in love with this mysterious girl named Olga. And she, meekly touching his face, also understands this ... The wind subsides, everything seems to be the same, but in the relations of the heroes everything changed in a few seconds ... ^[9] .

At the same time, the director directed not a lyrical film about love, but "a political drama exposing conformism." “As soon as his name appears on the CIA’s black lists,” writes A. V. Fedorov, “B. K. is ready to do anything - to humiliate himself, to sell his beloved woman” ^[9] .

The critic praised the play of the performers of two main roles:

L. Filatov (1946-2003) could easily make his hero a complete villain, a coward, and moral insignificance. But for him, like S. Soloviev, it was more important to show the figure is ambiguous. B.K. is smart, charming, Nazism hates quite sincerely. The trouble is that all of his liberalism is just words ... <...> In The Chosen, T. Drubich first encountered other people's customs, culture, traditions, and historical material. Perhaps this is why her play sometimes feels constrained, although the actress also has amazing scenes (confession in the church, “visit” to the American) ^[10] .

• Solovyov S. “The Chosen” // Soviet Screen. - 1983. - No. 6 . - S. 10-11 .
• Ohanyan D. A man without a face // The Art of Cinema. - 1984. - No. 3 . - S. 16-22 .
• Lipkov A.I. The world of films by Sergei Solovyov. - M .: Union of Cinematographers of the USSR, 1986. - S. 119-134. - 144 p.
• Fedorov A.V. Transformations of the image of the Western world on the Soviet and Russian screens: from the era of ideological confrontation (1946–1991) to the modern stage (1992–2016). - M .: Publishing House of the NGO Information for All, 2016. - P. 31—32. - 216 p.

• "Favorites" on the site "Encyclopedia of Russian Cinema"
• Movie Review at Cinematheque
• The Favorites on the Internet Movie Database  
• The film "Favorites" in the online movie theater "Mosfilm"
• Alfonso Lopez Michelsen