Sudba Cheloveka

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Nov 052007
 

I’m now re-watching portions of “Subda Cheloveka“, aka “Destiny of a Man”. It’s a Sergei Bondarchuk movie which came out in 1959. Bondarchuk not only directs, but is the lead actor.

Over at Netflix some of the reviewers take issue with the notion that this movie is propaganda. Well, it isn’t ideological propaganda. You could say it’s patriotic propaganda of a very human kind.

I actually enjoyed this movie a lot more than Bondarchuk’s War and Peace that came out in the following decade. The War and Peace extravaganza seemed to be one that was more intent on touching important points that an audience familiar with Tolstoy’s book would expect to see. Some coherence was lost in the process. This seems to be often the case with literature made into movies. Subda Cheloveka is based on a novel, too, but for whatever reason, didn’t seem to suffer from the usual malady.

Bondarchuk’s character, Solokov, goes through a long series of war-time horrors, and loses his family while in a German prison camp.

One part that was amusing to me was the part where Solokov gains the respect of his captors. And how does he do that? If it was an American movie, the conceit might be that American cinema is the wonderful thing that will open up the hearts of the foreigners. That’s how it worked with Brad Pitt and the Dalai Lama in “Seven Years in Tibet.” But the Russians have something different to offer: their drinking prowess. The Germans were about to shoot him for an impolitic remark when Solokov showed them how he could put down the liquor. So they instead ended up admiring him as a good soldier, making him a trustee and giving him the job of chauffeur to one of their officers. I suspect it tells us more about the Russian self-image than anything else, just like that stupid Brad Pitt movie tells us about the peculiar conceits of Hollywood movie makers. (I say this because I’ve seen both themes more often than in just these instances.)

And that leads to a question. Did such things really happen? No, I don’t mean the part about the Germans being so impressed by his ability to chug hard liquor. I mean the part about making him a chauffeur. Could such a thing have happened, that they would trust a prisoner to that degree? Was the ability to drive a vehicle so rare and the manpower shortage so severe that they would have dared let a Russian do it for them?

That’s my main question about historical accuracy. I also have one about human behavior. At the end the war is over and Solokov has lost his entire family. He ends up pulling himself together when he adopts a starving, homeless urchin. When he “reveals” himself to the boy as the father he had hardly known, I’ll bet a real-life boy would be somewhat reserved at that point. Even under those circumstances, real-life affection would take some time to grow.

But for real-life enjoyment, it doesn’t matter a lot. The movie is an obvious tearjerker, and that’s just fine. I liked it. There were some good scenes of the Russian countryside and of life in pre- and post-war Russia to help it along.

Toujours mangeant

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Oct 142007
 

This afternoon I re-watched parts of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse.

I especially wanted to watch the man who caught Varda’s attention because he was always eating (toujours mangeant) as he gleaned the leftovers from city markets. (And to give you an idea of how primitive my knowledge of French is, I had to look it up because I didn’t know anything about that form of manger. And who knows, without the English subtitles I might have missed it altogether.)

He’d go along, picking through thrown-out food, and stuffing his mouth as he worked. Some greens went straight from the sidewalk to his mouth. But he also impressed Varda because when she finally got to talking to him, she learned that he was very conscious of the specific nutritional qualities of what he was eating, which he says came about because he had a Masters degree in biology and had been an “assistant instructor.”

It is never explained why he now makes a small living selling magazines and newspapers on the sidewalk at the train station, instead of having a teaching job. But it was just plain enjoyable to watch him at his teaching gig. He lives in a shelter in which he said 50 percent of the people are illiterate. A lot of them are immigrants from Senegal and Mali. He teaches them to read, putting in a couple hours a day, students coming and going as they please. He is outside the school system, so it’s just volunteer work for him.

It was fascinating to watch as he did a word study with his students on the word “success.” One of them asked if it meant like Céline Dion. He agreed it was a good example. (I just now looked up some information about her life story on Wikipedia, and understand better why she came to mind.) But the joy of interaction between students and teacher in this and in other word studies makes one re-think that word “success,” and assign it a bigger meaning.

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse

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Oct 132007
 

Last night we finished watching The Gleaners and I, a film by Agnes Varda.

I am not going to say it shows how the homeless and have-nots live in France, because (for example) it’s not about “the homeless” even when it’s about homeless people. It’s about persons, some of whom are homeless, down on their luck, in difficult circumstances. And not all of the gleaners are have-nots. Some do it out of general principles. There are a lot of ways of living off of other peoples’ throwaways.

I especially liked that the Netflix DVD has an epilogue, in which Varda goes back two years later to see how some of the people she had filmed are doing. For some life goes on as before, for some there have been small changes for the better, at least in one case because of the publicity and recognition from having appeared in the film.

It’s very different from what NPR would do with a topic like this. There was not a single NPR-sounding voice in the whole thing. I don’t think I could have watched it if there had been.

And Varda is skeptical, like when the guy who lost his job as a truck driver for drinking on the job says, two years later, that he doesn’t drink any more. She points out that he smelled like wine. So he explains that he still drinks, but it’s a lot less than he used to. And it’s believable, because Varda was willing to dig below the surface. She is not hostile and she is not gullible or superficial. She is curious. And we come away having gotten to know some people we might not have otherwise met.

It also reminds me that I have some gleaners among my own relatives in the U.S., who might not mind my talking about it here, even if I can’t do so as colorfully as they do. But I’m not sure about that and I’m not going to. I suppose some people think I have my own tendencies along those lines.

And this Wednesday I was prepared to do some dumpster-diving at McDonalds where I thought I had thrown my billfold away with my burger bag. I suppose that would have given me a new appreciation for this whole topic. But my wife and I were relieved of the obligation to have that experience when we were told the trash had already been hauled away. I wrote more about it at The Spokesrider.

I’m going to watch this film at least once more, to help me work on my French. I can’t get anything new from Netflix for a few days anyway, because my credit card has been cancelled due to that billfold incident. But I’m also eager to get back to Russian films. I haven’t been working very hard on Russian in any form in the past couple weeks, though I do spend a few minutes with it almost every day.

Brideshead?

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Sep 202007
 

From a review at The American Spectator:

The excellent 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was re-run on my local TV recently. … From the religious point of view, the themes it dealt with included one that few writers in modern times have tackled — the fact that Salvation is offered to all and by Divine Grace the rich may be saved as well as the poor.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as an American or British TV series I could ever stand to watch, but this sounds interesting. How do I break the news to my wife, though, that I’d like to watch some television someday?

The description in that review reminds me somewhat of one of the Russian movies we watched several months ago: Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, based on a Chekov work. At first I considered sending it back to Netflix and trying something else. Why did I want to see a movie about superficial, degenerate aristocrats? But in the end I gave this one a 5. It wasn’t really a religious film, but it was surprising to us to see a respectful, non-superficial treatment of religion in a Soviet-era film. Granted, it wasn’t a pre-WWII Stalin film, but still, where would you have seen something like that in a U.S. made film?

Which reminds me, I wonder what director Nikita Mikhalkov is up to lately. The knock on him is that he is a political chameleon, taking on the coloration of whatever regime is in power. So what is he doing for Putin now? Or is he getting too old for movie-making anymore?

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Sep 062007
 

We finished watching it tonight. It’s an excellent film — one of the best. I’ll be watching this one again, and not just for the language lessons.

(So far I still rate Vozvrashcheniye as the best Russian language film I’ve seen. Not even Tarkovsky’s films top it, though I haven’t yet watched all of those.)

And there is a 3rd language in Since Otar left, and it is Georgian. The three main actresses all do wonderful work, but I would have thought that requiring fluency in French, Russian, AND Georgian would have constricted the pool of actresses considerably.

I found some good reviews at imdb.com that explain it. Esther Gorintin, who played the grandma, is Polish and already spoke French and Russian, but refused to learn any Georgian for the film. She was not one of those who spoke Georgian. The granddaughter apparently learned some Georgian, and the mother (Nino Khomasuridze) is a native Georgian.

The Georgian is all gibberish to me, and I have no way of knowing whether the French is good Parisian French or whether the Russian was French-accented. It was fun trying to follow what I could of it (and without subtitles, it would have been a lot less). Following them as they switched from French to Russian and back was interesting enough, but then to have Georgian thrown in as a wild card!

Just as interesting were the ordinary street scenes in both Tblisi and Paris, the home scenes — furnishings, life with intermittent electricity and water — in the apartment in Tbilisi, and the rundown dacha. I would watch it again just for that, but there is a lot more than that to watch.

Depuis qu’Otar est parti…

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Sep 052007
 

We started watching this one tonight. So far it’s a good movie no matter what language the characters are speaking — heading towards a Netflix rating of 5 from me — but are we sure the only two languages being spoken are French and Russian? So far it seems the granddaughter tends to speak French and the mother Russian. The grandma speaks French with her beloved son, and Russian with some of her friends/family. (The sweet grandma defends Stalin and her hard, antagonistic daughter calls him a murderer.) There’s a lot of Russian I don’t understand (French, too, for that matter) but there is some talk in this movie that’s complete gibberish to me. Is it Georgian? From the subtitles I’d expect to understand a few words of it if it was Russian or French, but I don’t follow any of those parts at all.

Nonna Mordyukova

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Aug 312007
 

Maybe I didn’t give Brilliantovaya ruka quite enough credit. I only gave it a Netflix rating of 3, but there is an interesting part played by Nonna Modryukova.

It took me a while to remember where I had seen her before. She was the Komissar in the movie Komissar, and did a great job in that film. Some googling informed me that she had also been in the film Vokzal dlya Dvoikh. Of course. Now I remember. She was the “Uncle” who gave that subversive little talk about the virtues of private property and private enterprise.

In this film she plays a “house manager”, where she is a busybody pest who minds other peoples’ business, looks out for residents who are living beyond their means, and puts up public denunciations of people who don’t live properly (in the form of signs posted in front of the buildings where they live). Is she a parody of a type of character who was extant in Russia in 1968? I don’t know, but wish I understood more of how that worked.

I previously said the movie managed to show the police and other authorities as noble, virtuous people — very competent at what they were doing, and almost omniscient. It’s kind of hard to make a comedy/James Bond-type movie if you have to play the cops that way. But if this house manager was an authority figure, then we can say that not all authority figures were portrayed sympathetically. (Her response to the statement that a dog is a man’s best friend. “Man’s best friend is the superintendent.” I presume that’s another term for her character’s job.)

Was this part of the movie a bit subversive for 1968? I don’t know. But it’s fun trying to learn about things like that. I do know that I’ve enjoyed watching Nonna Mordyukova every time I’ve seen her so far.

I’m not sure if she is still alive or not. I saw one news item from a couple of years ago that suggested she was in bad health then.

Brilliantovaya ruka

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Aug 262007
 

Tonight we finished watching the 1968 film, The Diamond Arm.

So how does one make a comedy film about a diamond smuggling ring, complete with slapstick, but in which the police and other authorities all are competent, virtuous and likable people? Believe it or not, it can be done! If you were a filmmaker in Soviet Russia in 1968, you could find a way to do it.

Netflix has this description:

One of the most beloved Russian comedies, this eccentric farce from celebrated director Leonid Gaidai — based on a true story he read in the newspaper — concerns a criminal operation that smuggles gold and diamonds inside a plaster arm cast. Modest economist Semyon Gorbunkov and a swindler named The Count embark on a wild series of smuggling adventures peppered with comic dialogue that spawned several popular catchphrases.

I don’t think it will be one the most beloved comedies for my wife and me, but it was interesting to watch, just the same. One reason was to see how they could manage humor without hitting any sacred cows.

It was also a good movie for sometimes giving me the impression that my Russian is coming along nicely. There were places where I could anticipate what was being said, or where I could tell that the subtitles were definitely not a literal translation. But I missed a lot, too. There were plenty of places where I understood nothing.

One Netflix reviewer, possibly someone from Russia, said:

This is one of the best russian musical comedies. Gaidai is at his best poking fun at soviet propaganda, that was fed to people going to foreign country.

I don’t think I caught much of that poking of fun. So maybe my Russian learning has a long ways to go. I guess I know where a little of that fun was, but for social commentary this was definitely nothing like Eldar Ryasanov’s films.

Vokzal Dlya Dvoikh

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Jul 212007
 

We watched part of Railway Station for Two again tonight. It’s my 3rd or 4th time. My major excuse is that it’s a good one for learning the language, which it is indeed. But I continue to be amazed. That had to have been a subversive film in pre-Gorbachev Russia. It would be a subversive film even in the U.S., at least in the vicinity of our major universities, for its portrayal of the values of private property and free markets.

I only hope that Madame Hillary’s prison camps will be as gentle as the Siberian gulag shown in that film.

And I continue to enjoy that Russian actors know how to act like they’re really cold when it’s supposed to be cold out, though it may have helped that the Siberian winter segments were filmed on site in winter. Hollywood has no clue how to portray winter realistically, but these people do. One thing not even the Russians can do is show how emaciated a person looks when deprived of food. This one has a charming way of making the point, though, in passing.

Too bad Netflix has very few of Eldar Ryazanov’s films. This one makes me want to see more. But I just now moved “The Irony of Fate, or ‘Enjoy your bath'” to the top of my Netflix queue. (Well, not quite the top. I’ve promised to get “Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage” next, and I’m looking forward to another viewing of that one, too.)

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