"The Very Same Munchausen" and "Marriage Story" — On Nobody Wanting to Hear Anybody

What order or peace can there be when even people close to each other often can't agree on anything. In this country the problem of tolerance and of differing opinions towers over every other problem going: nobody wants to hear another point of view, everybody is satisfied with the official one, or the only one on offer. It's calmer that way, and safer.

And every year television plays Mark Zakharov's "The Very Same Munchausen," which says fairly plainly and fairly loudly that we should listen to one another and take people as they are. The film was made under the pressure of Soviet censorship, which only makes it land harder now.

The level of aggression seems to be rising everywhere, not only here. It's no accident that "Marriage Story" appeared, in which an apparently successful couple (Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson) go through an enormous crisis that ends in divorce.

In the comments people started attacking the fact that the central character's father turns out to be gay and leaves the family — an odd thing to object to, given it's mentioned once, in passing, and goes nowhere. Apparently that's simply the national reflex, pre-installed: fight homosexual relationships wherever they appear.

It was only after Baron Munchausen's death that anyone understood what his life had been worth; in "Marriage Story" the understanding also arrives near the end, but with far more for the viewer to put down along the way — otherwise none of it comes together.