The same, with a difference

Remake is not a very word in Russian cinema yet. It applies to America, where they like to shoot the same script several times. Often, it’s done without a wish to parody the original; yet attempts to use cinema classics as background for ironic rewondering happen too.

Such appears to be the goal of Igor & Gleb, the Aleinikov brothers-film, ex-editors of handwritten paper, Cine-Phantom, and authors of the 1980’s Underground Cinema. They took the script of a famous I.Pyriev comedy, Tractor-drivers (1939), and made a parody in the spirit of amateur action films about Russian Mafia. At first it’s funny. Why not? The female tractor-driver Mariana lives in a luxurious villa, drivers an American car, shoots every kind of weapon expertly. Rivals from a competing farm resemble a gang of terrorists and assassins. The ex-solder Klim has to make an uneasy choice between these two armed, warring groups.

Unfortunately, the authors’ imagination and fantasy are sufficient for a 30-minute movie only. In 15 to 20 minutes the film’s action stops going anywhere, the tricks and gags are being repeated, and it doesn’t look funny at all. In a word, 85 minutes of The Tractor-drivers 2 are too much. And what was forgivable in enthusiastic amateurs, on the big screen looks like unprofessionalism.

A Russian Shveik

Recently a lot of movies have shown, with realistic thoroughness, the horrors of Russian army life: violence, cruelty, crimes, murders. Y.Volkogon’s Saluting! , for what may be one of the first Russian film, tells about the same problems in the comedic tradition of novelist Gashek’s unforgettable hero, The Good Soldier Shveik.

The comedy evolves with some bitterness, but it is funny at the same time. A.Androsov brightly plays Ivan, the recruit who manages to make fools of stupid authorities and even Ministry commissioners with his untamed optimism and idiotically thorough completion of orders. Half Shveik, half hero of folk tales, Ivan comes safe and sound through dead-end situation to win the love of his commander’s daughter.

Viewers who know Russian army life will probably get genuine pleasure from how the movie turns into gags so many barracks customs, from the cleaning of latrines to the thousand repetitions of the same drills. Reality, however, can be glimpsed in each absurd episode. Wouldn’t it be great if everything shown in Saluting! Were just a fantasy!

Country Clumsiness

The star of V.Chikov’s comedy About Businessman Foma, M.Evdokimov, used to be famous in Russia as a music-hall comic, reading humorous and satirical monologues in the character of a rural athlete who from time to time comes out of a bathhouse with “a red face and vodka inside the shirt”. Director Chikov decided to adapt this character for the big screen by making Evdokimov into Foma, a tractor-driver who, having sunk his tractor while drunk, decides to open a pay-restroom in his native village. The film obviously expects laughter to be evoked by this odd situation itself. Really, though, what is a public toilet for in this tiny village where everybody has his own house? The gag is simply not enough for a full-length comedy. Aware of that, the script adds racketeering and a mad Communist who decides to protest this form of private property by burning himself in the new toilet.

Sometimes it gets laughs, but on the whole it’s too monotonous and clumsy. Evdokimov’s original monologues, told from the scene, were much funnier.

With Maternity in Mind

A young, single, pretty woman wants to have a baby without marrying its father. It’s not so easy, however, to find a suitable man. In A Baby for November director A. Pavlovsky develops this idea in the comedy genre (though the events can be easily imagined in a dramatic version). A line of male characters, all unsound for our heroine’s purpose, passes episodically before our eyes. Finally, a married friend lets her borrow her stupid husband (one of the most popular actors of today’s Russian cinema, S. Makovetsky, is very good as this infantile fellow)

There are plenty of spicy situations which, I suppose, would be likable if directed by French masters for erotic comedies. But Pavlovsky is neither Michel Deville nor Roger Vadim. Erotic here lack charm, and there is no improvisational delicacy in the performances of the majority of actors. A sex comedy doesn’t have to be so serious.

An Author Acts

Nearly every famous actor in Russia today has decided to try directing. So have screenwriters and even film critics. More often, though, music-hall comics and pop singers become movie actors – and the screenwriters are taking a turn. They used to write scripts. Now they perform in film. In leading roles. You want an example? Here you are: a film by S.Nikonenko (also an actor, by the way), I want Your Husband, in which the man of the title is played by writer-humorist M.Zadornov, who decided to transfer his own monologues to the screen.

One day a wife opens an apartment door and there stands some lady declaring that she wants to buy her precious spouse. This start is rather intriguing. But as soon as the husband appears the movie turns into a kind of radio show or TV performance of Zadornov reading his stories. This famous writer lacks the acting skills to keep viewers’ attention for an hour and a half. And the director hasn’t helped him at all; action, taking place primarily in one room, is filmed uncreatively, on the level of a common new report.

The great Chaplin, as we know, was a screenwriter, director, actor and composer all at the same time. But he was Chaplin…

Not Quite a “The Sting”

In its script and style, V.Mishatkin’s crime comedy We Will Meet in Tahiti resembles George Roy Hill’s famous The Sting and its Polish variation Va-Banque by U.Mahulski. This director’s level is undeniably lower, and the movie came out not brilliant, but there are many funny episodes and the gags are no worse than any of Mel Brooks’. Young actors play – with visible pleasure – the roles of the smart rogues; L.Kuravlev is excellent as their elder colleague, a lover in the guise of a thief-pensioner…

Service Compris?

It is common to give tips to waiters in a restaurant. That’s a rule all over the world. The protagonist of R.Zurzumia’s comedy The Waiter with the Gold Tray decides to break the rule and step out of the game. This is dangerous: his colleagues, not wanting “the good guy” around, call him a traitor. The restaurant’s customers, surprised by this waiter’s unusual behavior, almost kill him.

The situation of the “white crow” is not a new one for art. Yet it’s one thing when authors of a film depict, for example, someone standing up against a totalitarian regime, it’s another when they just tell about a man who doesn’t want to take extra money from clients.

Zurzumia pays no attention to this difference, making the waiter (played by the popular Russian actor A.Abdulov) almost a hero, one worthy of the Honored Legion awards. This could be forgiven if the movie had shone with artistic fantasy, gags, quick-witted dialogue. Unfortunately, the script of The Waiter with the Gold Tray is another one failing to justify a full-length film

Seeing Paris

French motifs have become very popular in Russia. “To see Paris and die” – the title of a A.Proshkin film – become the theme of a lot of Russian films and Y.Mamin’s comedic fantasy The Window into Paris, characters can be instantaneously transported between Petersburg communal houses and the center of modern Paris. Mamin plays up the essential difference between Slav and Western mentalities rather successfully. One unlucky Frenchwoman, who finds herself almost naked in a dirty Petersburg yard, is absolutely unable to get used to situations that surround all Russians from childhood, while Russian citizens – having discovered a magical route to France – in several days begin to trade in the French stock market and steal whatever isn’t fastened down. Against such a background, the figure of a failed musician, an aged romantic who just wants to get pleasure from the sudden gift of fate, seems funny and odd.

Maybe the best joke of the film, in which Mamin sounds the highest note of pitiless sarcasm, is the sequence about a restaurant musician who moved to France about ten years ago. Lazily offering cognac to a former friend, he abuses Frenchmen and their customs, sentimentally recalls Russia and almost cries while saying that he would give everything for an opportunity to return to Petersburg just for one minute. As a gag, his friend fulfils this wish (via the magical “open window”). But instead of the expected ecstasy, the emigrant – seeing an armored car in front of the Petersburg railway station – falls into despair.

The fact is that modern Russia is good only in sentimental dreams and in conversations before the cozy foreign fireplaces of restaurants with a view of the Sein, the Thames or the Hudson.

I can’t say that Mamin’s film is as funny as the early comedies of Leonid Gaidai. There are brilliant comedy scenes and pointedly devised details (in the principals office of a private college for young businessmen, hanging portraits of political leaders have been replaced by gigantic dollar symbols), but they are side by side with useless dialogue and events.

The finale of the film – driven by the slogan “We don’t need French shores” – isn’t, frankly speaking, new. There are, however, more successes in The Window into Paris than stereotypes.

Almost a Fairy Tale

Kira Muratova’s film The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) was strict uncompromising, even ruthless in its aesthetics and vocabulary. Her The Sensitive Militiaman’sstyle is completely opposite: imitative conventions harmonize with a fairy-tale plot.

Anatoly, a nice young soldier, finds a baby in a cabbage patch one night and wants to adopt him. This idea might have been taken from the half-forgotten Russian cinema of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when there were very popular lyric films about sweet lovers and handsome babies. And, in fact, at first sight The Sensitive Militiaman seems to be a naïve, bright movie about love and compassion awakening in its hero.

But K.Muratova remains faithful to herself. Her film is a subtly stylized, unusual toying with mythology, ironic quotations and eccentric characters… all making it impossible not to notice a connection with her previous works – The Long Seeing Out (1971), Learning the World (1978), The Change of Faith (1988) and others.

The slightness and transparency of this picture may be a surprise for those who expected a new Asthenic Syndrome. Muratova’s talent, however, was always unpredictable, original, mobile. For some, her cinema is affected; for others, this writer included, it is attractive and masterly.

Fantasies and Parables…

A Fearsome Story

The authors of Gongofer speak frankly and ironically about the old and new clichés of fearful cinema tales. I wouldn’t, however, call this film, directed by B.Kilibaev, a clear parody. It is a fantasy on the theme, with hints of the stories of Nikolai Gogol, its style in the spirit of the genre’s aesthetics.

Kolka, a young Cossack, comes to the capital with his uncle to buy a bull for breeding. Initially the film recalls Pig-Woman and Shepherd (1941) with its pompous fountains and frank, intellect-unburdened faces of the heroes that look as if they were created especially for the cinema, glorifying the best collective farmers in the world. But soon after, the unpretentious comedy about provincials in Moscow for the first time breaks off as the ill-fated Kolka meets the blond beauty Hanna – who turns out to be a witch and exchanges eyes with the guy during their love ecstasy.

Kilibaev deliberately makes this perfidious substitution shocking and natural. The camera keeps our attention on the spreading eye slime in the palm of treacherous Hanna, surrounded with a hellish glow. And then a chain of funny and rather frightening episodes begins, in which Kolka and his uncle try to get his stolen eyes back.

Gongofer can be reproached for its eclectic lack of style. But despite that Kilibaev managed to make it a dynamic show, whimsically combining myths of the epoch of Socialist Realism with special effects like Joe Dante’s.

What Boredom!

 E.Nikolaeva’s film Sextale is derived form Vladimir Nabokov’s airy, refined story The Tale, as is clear to any admirer of the works of famous Russian-American writer. But I’ll avoid comparing screen and prose because during all the action of Sextale the original plot’s development is absent. The filmmakers, probably, isn’t want to write more dialogue than Nabokov did and decided to fill in the pauses (the story is short and film is long) with displays of whimsical decorations, costumes, smoke and fog. The set decorators and artists really worked hard on this. It needed something else, however… such as actors with skill. On one hand L.Gurchenko is supple and musical in the role of The Devil, tempting a pretty young man with displays of erotic desire. (It is the tempter’s whim that the fellow can choose – until midnight – any number of the most beautiful women, providing this number is odd.) On the other hand, there are inexpressive performances, in unemotional erotic scenes, by all the other actors. Add to this an unjustified reserve of action, slack cutting, and badly recorded sound. In short, it is very boring – despite the participation of the bright Gurchenko with her playful expression, biting irony, and natural sense of style.

Rather than seeing the movie, it’s better to read Nabokov.

Too Obvious an Allegory

A rain of festival awards and unanimously enthusiastic opinions greeted the film Drumaniada by S.Ovcharov practically from the first days of its release. “A unique contribution to the development of Russian cinema”, “faithful to the theme of love for life” – those were some phrases praising the picture. My voice, I’m afraid, will be omitted from the chorus. Drumaniada seems to me the weak work of a talented director.

Previous fantasies by Ovcharov – Clumsy (1979), Flight of Fancy (1983), Left-hander (1986) and his version of Saltykov-Schedrin’s The Story of the One Town under the title The It (1989) – were created in an atmosphere of strict censorship that began to weaken and die only at the end of the ‘80s. Using the traditions of Russian folklore and comedy tricks from the great silent films, Ovcharov created a world built on eccentric allegory. I can’t say that director openly presented puzzles and symbols to his viewers, but the satirical sharpness of his films (The It especially) probably was read by every attentive admirer of the tenth muse.

In contrast, unnecessarily straightforward, newspaper-style satire can be felt in Drumaniada in spite of its allegorical plot. The premise itself is interesting: to make a one and a half-hour parable – about the misadventures of a funeral orchestra’s drummer who inherits an enchanted drum labeled “Stradivarius” with which he travel around Russia – without the characters speaking a single word.

But… again there’s a captious “but”… the story of this poor wretch is good enough for a short film only. Forty minutes into the picture one feels the exhaustion of the method, as one monotonous episode follows another. Even a scene in which the wonderful drum turns into a TV set for several minutes is just boring. And the climactic sequence of the visit of foreign homeless people to Russia, taking place in a town’s rubbish heap, is rather crudely made, and the actors’ performances are inexpressive.

An image of this country as a rubbish heap populated by homeless beggars has become the Russian media’s most widespread cliché. The film’s other symbols are equally straightforward and shallow. The signing of treaties for collaboration between Russian and foreign beggars won’t impress anybody as a satirically courageous fantasy. And there are a great number of such scenes. The behavior of the main character – the sad clown, a pale reflection of Baster Keaton – and the development of early episodes become too predictable. The only good thing about Drumaniada is the music on the soundtrack: Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler – this is forever!

Ivanov after Godard

For his directorial debut in feature cinema, E.Ivanov chose an ambitious project requiring a subtle stylistic gift: anew version of Jean-Luc Godard’s brilliant 1959 `A Bout de souffle(Breathless) . Ivanov’s film is called Nicotine, and its action takes place not in Paris at the end of ‘50s, but in Petersburg of ‘90s. On the whole, the plot’s lines – and even several details of the characters’ dress – are retained. But something like the fantasies of Leos Carax and Jean-Jacques Beinex breaks the style of the “new wave” at times. In general, this film is close to the classical understanding of the word “remake” without parody, admixtures or eccentric pranks.

It’s a pity that Ivanov insistently demands we pay attention to his source, the legendary Godard’s debut with Belmondo and Seberg in the leading roles. He does this by making the characters attend a lecture by cinema critic and director O.Kovalov, who introduces the film `A Bout de souffle to Petersburg’s movie fans; and he also restages one of Godard’s press conferences with the help of a double.

This persistence is worthy of a better application for two reasons. First, viewers who know the creative work of Godard very well, or who at least saw `A Bout de souffle? Guess the family tree several minutes into Nicotine without any oral prompts. Secondly, viewers who don’t know who Godard is will be helped neither by lecture episodes nor by stills of his old masterpiece to perceive Nicotine as a remake: the visual associations, cutting and plot parallels remain “unreadable”.

Yet Ivanov’s biggest mistake, it seems to me, is in the unfortunate choice of actors who very much let him down. It’s hard to suppose, certainly, that a young director might his the target and find Russian performers whose scale of personality and charm would live up to Belmondo’s and Seberg’s But having cast actors deprived of not only inward charm also attractive appearance, Ivanov had to use them as visual effects, simply opportunities to underline – in strange, long passages of light and shade – the black and white style of the film.

The emotional influence `A Bout de souffle? In which the reckless Michel, having accidentally killed a cop, tried to fight his fate till the tragic realization of the exhaustion of his life, is left below the surface by the director of Nicotine.

That is why, to my mind, this is not a warm declaration of love to the French “new wave” but the fruit of cold, professional calculation.

To Believe the Prophecy for a Moment…

The film of E.Riazanov get sadder form year to year. The Prophecy is perhaps his most sorrowful. It even has a gloomy outset: a famous writer (O.Basilashvili) learns from a Gypsy fortune-teller that only a day is left for him to live and he is to meet with an unexpected man.

In that mystical tone a young man (A.Sokolov) with the same name and same temple scar appears in the writer’s flat. Who is this mysterious double – phantom or guardian angel? The answer remains open throughout the film.

So the time of summing-up comes for the tired writer, shaken by life. He is well-to-do in Russian terms: he has an apartment in the center of Moscow, a car and video camera, and his books are published in Paris. But, characteristically for a man living in a country of endless admonitions, distress his look reveals the effect of freedom’s absence. And it’s not because of the peculiarities of his biography (his father perished during the repressions, his mother is Jewish – which he couldn’t mention for a long time – and his wife died in a car accident). The brand of unfreedom is stamped on practically everybody in Russia, except those under 20.

In that regard, the choice of actress for the leading female role was perfect: French star Irene Jacob Though her character is just a modest cashier in a bank, she can be at once distinguished from the surrounding Russian fuss by her uncommon expression. She becomes a fairy princess and, probably, the writer’s last love… for this princess is colored by the shade of nostalgia for unrealized dreams.

In contrast with Riazanov’s previous works (Dear Elena Sergeevna, etc.), there is little topical populism – although the conclusion is connected with one of the most widespread script devices in Russia today (escaping from Mafia pursuit, the hero tries to leave for Israel). Sensitive to his audiences’ mood, Riazanov couldn’t but feel that a mass interest in cinematic political investigations and revelations has almost disappeared, while the need for melodramatic love stories is great.

Actually, The Prophecy, can’t be called melodrama. There are comedy episodes (a visiting fanatic suggests that the writer burn himself in Red Square as protest against something – it’s not important against something – it’s not important against what, the main thing is to perform the action), and there are elements of a parable. I don’t find such a genre alloy organic and convincing. This seems to be the director’s attempt to get a second wind.