Reticulator

Against his own free will

Nov 272009

The first time I watched Pokrov Gate, maybe a year ago or so, I thought it was just entertainment — a movie-length situation comedy. After all, while it isn’t hard to imagine that a communal apartment would be a rich source of material, it’s not easy to imagine this situation in real life. (BTW, there are spoilers here. You have been warned.)

Margarita Khobotova dumped her absent-minded, klutzy husband for another guy who was home when her husband wasn’t — dumped a brainy, literary guy for a brawny worker. It’s not too hard to imagine opportunities for that to happen in a kommunalka, though there wasn’t much you could do that your neighbors didn’t know about. But her ex continued to live in the same kommunalka with shared kitchen and bath, though he also had a separate room for himself. It’s a little far-fetched, but there were housing shortages back in the 50s, so people did what they had to do.

And she continued to run her ex’s life, including his attempts at a love life. Well, there is no shortage of domineering women (or men) in the world. If we have them here in America, why not in Russia, too? And there is no shortage of men (or women) who allow themselves to be dominated, though this seems to be an extreme case. But for Margarita’s new guy to be an active participant in this project? It starts to get a little silly, but it’s entertaining in a way that would be possible only if there is some slight connection to reality. And it does have that.

So I thought it was an entertaining film about personal relationships — one that was worth watching again, which we’ve done just this week.

But we weren’t far into it on my 2nd watching when I started to get the idea that this is an allegory of our political situation in the U.S. Margarita Khobotova is like the nanny-staters who think people aren’t competent to make their own decisions and run their own lives. Those people seem to be winning out, even though they have all the charm and finesse of Margarita.

But then, at the very end, I began to suspect that the comparison is not just something that I came up with by myself. The film is not just about personal relationships. Either the writer (Leonid Zorin) or the director (Mikhail Zozakov) or perhaps both had put in a subtle political message, too. (This was in 1982 when there were still limits on what they could say.)

All the way through the film is full of laughs. But suddenly, at the end, it gets a bit serious. In the screen shot above, Margarita Khobotova complains to those who helped her ex get away from her clutches: “You doomed him to sure death.”

And for the first and only time in the film, Kostik gets serious. He has up to this time been having a great time as a student who has come to the big city to study history. His aunt dotes on him, the communal phone rings constantly with the calls of his many girlfriends, and he is full of jokes and one-liners. But suddenly he quits joking when Margarita accuses him of being too young to know better. He tells her, “Yes, I’m young. But believe a historian. You can’t make someone happy against his own free will.”

“Believe a historian.” Ah, yes. We all know of historical examples of attempts to do just that. Some of us have had to live with them.

Hunting critics

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Nov 202009

Myra and I are still watching Idiot. One more session to go. But I need something to watch while running on the elliptical machine, so for that I’ve been re-watching Obyknovennoye Chudo. With the music and all the weird scene changes it’s a good one to accompany physical activity.

Speaking of strange twists, this is one I missed before. It’s a scene to make you go, “Huh? Where did that come from?” It takes place at the remote hunting lodge in the mountains. It’s a scene that has nothing to do with anything that has gone before, as far as I can tell. The hunter is comparing his craft to literary or artistic work, complete with the critics he has to endure.

On the other hand, maybe it does have something to do with what has gone before. The volshebnik (writer/magician) who is creating the story that is unfolding wants to do something interesting with his talents. But his creative efforts are for the sake of his wife, not for the sake of innovation or creativity.

As one who has long thought that teaching creativity is a good way to kill creativity, it could be that I agree with Mark Zakharov on the subject. (It’s risky to be absolutely certain about it, given my unfamiliarity with the language. I probably miss a lot of subtle points that would help me understand better.)

Forgive us our happiness

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Nov 172009

It’s not easy to follow the part of the series with Ipollit, partly because I haven’t read the book, and partly because his is not a type we have in our society. He is as self-absorbed as the worst of us baby boomers, but even more of a drama queen. He’s supposed to be dying of what seems to be tuburculosis, though that word isn’t used. Neither he nor the people around him have heard the government regulations about swine flu and how it’s important to cover your coughs, stay away from people when you’re coughing, wash your hands, etc.

I thought about him when I read this Mary Gordon essay at Killing the Buddha about the Prodigal Son (which I found via Arts & Letters Daily). It has to do with the difficulty the older son has in celebrating the younger son’s return, especially when there is some question whether the kid has really learned his lesson and is repentant.

In answer to Ipollit’s question of what’s the most virtuous way for him to die (he seems determined to make a grand spectacle of it) Prince Mushkin says, “You should pass us by and forgive us our happiness.” I don’t know what Ipollit does with that advice — haven’t yet got that far. But it didn’t seem to be the answer he wanted.

What this scene inspired me to do is to finally look for the Russian text on line in a printable version, and an English translation to go with it. I’ve printed the first chapter. Now to try to slog through it. It’ll take a while.

Inna Mikhailovna Churikova

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Nov 162009

I don’t normally care much for movies about the lives and manners of aristocratic families. But this family in Idiot is fun to watch. I’m not sure how much of the credit should go to Dostoevsky and how much to the filmmakers, but together they made these people interesting. It isn’t just the individuals, but the inter-generational interactions that draw us in. There is some of your typical youthful rebellion, but the whole of the relationship between parents and children goes a lot deeper than that.

In this scene, General Yepanchin (nicely played by Oleg Basilashvili) while not clueless, is also not quick to understand what’s happening with his daughter. His wife, played by Inna Mikhailovna Churikova, is trying to signal him behind her back not to take her reaction wrongly.

Churikova’s character is one of several highlights of this TV series. She’s made up to look like a severe aristocratic mother, and has moments when she does indeed act the part of a domineering matriarch. But even when she does she’s an instant away from being as childlike (in many ways) as Prince Myshkin had judged her to be. This is definitely not a stereotypical role.

No brother in Brother-2

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Nov 082009

Some of the commenters at IMDB claim that Brother-2 got bad reviews from Americans because it is anti-American and shows lots of Americans getting killed by the Russian guy.

Nonsense. Hollywood has produced a steady diet of anti-American movies for as long as I can remember. And lots of those I see in the previews at movie houses show Americans being gunned down all over the place.

In fact, that’s the problem with Brat-2. It’s too much like an American movie. It also has the same shallow moralizing about materialism that you can get in any number of American films.

For a movie that makes an attempt to come to grips with the poisonous nature of materialism, watch the original Brat. That movie shows you, instead of just giving you meaningless talk. In that movie, Sveta makes difficult choices throughout. So does the German.

In Brat you are given reasons to care about the people who are caught up in the greed and violence. Not so in Brat-2. There isn’t even anything about “brother” in the sequel, even though the two characters are both present. In Brat-2 there is no brother relationship. In the original there was.

The film does have some redeeming value. Just as in Brat and Gruz 200, Alexsei Balabanov has quite an eye for filming grimy urban street scenes, as in the clip above.

Brat-2 fulfils its purpose

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Nov 072009

I recognized the above scene near the end of Brat-2. It was from the cover to one of Anna Lawton’s books.

The main purposes of sequels is to exploit us and disappoint us, I suppose. Brat-2 fulfilled its purpose better than, say, the sequel to Irony of Fate, which while not as good as the original, was worth watching twice, and which I’d like to watch again sometime.

After it was over, I was hoping Brat-2 could be excused by having been made by someone other than the maker of the original Brat, but IMDB tells us that Aleksey Balabanov made them both. Balabanov also made another excellent film: Gruz 200. Maybe sequels are just too limiting even for someone of Balabanov’s abilities.

Both Brats are violent films, but the violence in Brat-2 is merely senseless violence. In Brat-2 we aren’t even made to feel horrified by what it does to the victims or the perpetrator. Victims just pose so they can be easy targets to be gunned down.

There is nothing of Doestoevsky in Brat-2, like there is in Brat with the relationship with Daniela’s brother, or the girlfriend, or the German or Kat. In Brat-2 the brother is just dropped out of the picture at the end, which is symbolic of what’s missing in the entire film.

Tax Revolt

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Nov 032009

A guy on a plane in a 1979 Russian movie is reading a news magazine that has the headline “Tax Revolt!” on the cover. So who would be reading a magazine like that? A good guy or a bad guy?

This is a science fiction movie based on a Stanislaw Lem novel. The U.S. seems to be the setting for this part of the film.

The movie came out around the time of the Howard Jarvis tax revolt in California. I don’t know what the Russian and Polish news media said about it, if anything. Here in the U.S. the governing class went into eternal conniptions over it.

Brat

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Oct 292009

I didn’t expect a Russian gangster movie to be this good. After I finished watching Brat (Brother) tonight, I was walking around the house, thinking about what I had seen, wondering why I was attracted to such a violent, repulsive movie. But then it occured to me that this film has some Doestoevsky-like qualities to it.

I would guess that I’m not the first person to have said so.

The person who did the subtitles didn’t have a good command of English. But it probably wouldn’t seem right if they were done better. They fit. The one in the screenshot doesn’t make enough sense for me to understand what was so funny about it, but maybe it’s better that way. The WikiQuote page for the film is also a mess — just right for the film.

Party-Time

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Oct 132009

I still haven’t worked up enough nerve to finish watching Voditel dlya Very. Instead I took in something easy and watched parts of Ironya Sudba.

I’ve watched it a few times already, but this time something caught my eye just a few seconds from the end of Part One.

In most of the Eldar Ryazanov films I’ve seen, he works something about western communication technology into the film. In Vokzal dlya Voikh (1982) it was a VCR player. In Sluzhebnyy roman it was a built-in 8-track player in a car. In these two films, the items were shown as if some new technology was being introduced to the viewers. In Beregis Avtomobilya the bad guy helped obtain a western tape player (if I remember correctly) on the black market, because the customer said a Soviet one wouldn’t do.

Ryazanov has made a lot more films than that, most of which I have not seen. So I don’t know if this is a theme that recurs throughout. Until I saw the above screenshot in Ironya Sudba, I thought it might be an exception. But the close-up of the phonograph turntable shows the English words “Party-Time.”

Why an American (or English) phonograph in a film in which Barbara Brylska had her voice dubbed because it wasn’t Russian enough? I presume that in 1971 there were Russian phonographs, too. Is Ryazanov playing a little game with us?

Google hasn’t helped me learn much about Party-Time phonographs, btw. I’ve found a few that are sold as collectors items, but they look cheaper than the one shown in the film. It’s not a brand name that I recall ever paying attention to.

Some films are hard to watch

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Oct 082009

Last night I watched several more sections of Voditel dlya Very, but had to stop at this point in part 9 where Viktor sees the General’s key to his personal safe. It’s too painful to go on, because it looks like Viktor is about to do something that is not going to be able to be undone, and which is going to hurt many people at many levels. I am going to watch the rest of it, but first I have to work up enough nerve for it, which means it could be another day or even another week.

It was a lot easier to watch this 1971 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Easy, but not particularly interesting, except for a few shipboard scenes. It’s a textbook example of the problem of filmmakers trying to be faithful to the book from which a film is made. (The Lord of the Rings is another example that comes to mind.)

I don’t see how this film could make much sense to a person hadn’t read the book. It’s too disjointed, the acting is poor, and the characters aren’t developed. It’s merely a video illustration of some of the scenes in the book. And it’s probably not as good a set of illustrations as those made by the artist N.C. Wyeth. They have the disadvantage that unlike Wyeth’s illustrations, they’re not printed in the book. If you remember how the story goes (I have a vague memory of it from years ago) you might find it interesting to see how well these illustrations fit. But you’ll probably get better video pictures in your imagination if you spend your time re-reading the book instead.

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