Reviews

The film details the journey of two brothers, Ivan and Andrei, and their unnamed father to a remote island wilderness. The integrity in which the film exposes the heart and soul of the young boy Ivan is matched only by a subtle, yet powerful and enduring mantra skillfully weaved into the masterpiece that is Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return.

The first clue is the title. "The Return" is immediately understood to refer to the return of Ivan and Andrei's father after a twelve year absence, but such a connection is a blatant deception to hide a hard truth about the world around us; a truth that may only be revealed by participating in Ivan and Andrei's journey of self-discovery: Every journey has an end. This describes the cycle of life and death in nature. In this metaphor, the father is nature's caustic envoy. His instruction, discipline, intimidation, force, violence, and love educates and prepares the boys to live and thrive in an untempered world that has the power to destroy man's temporary splendor.

The visuals and shots complement the life cycle. The days of the week demarcate the action of the film, ending on the day it began. The camera often cuts to different perspectives in such a way to measure distances. Each "tower" has both a shot at the base and at the very top. After Ivan is left alone on the road, we see the car traveling in the far distance. We see a dead bird, and fish out of water. Ivan's defiance is the response to the world's neglect. Who is he really talking to when he pulls out the knife and proclaims, "I could have loved you, but you're terrible!"? He is speaking to the world he is witnessing first hand.

As a final lesson, Ivan's father sacrifices himself when Ivan threatens to jump off the island's tower. The boat on which the boys lay his corpse sinks and we are reminded of the opening shot of the sunken dingy to which we have "returned".

Ivan, a boy living in the years of Perestroika and Glasnost, finds himself on the precipice between youth and adulthood. Unlike "little" Vera, the world of adults is not something he outright rejects. Evidence may be found in his calm, unflinching demeanor, his compassion for his family, and his seamless ease of integration in the company of adults, but nothing more clearly stands out than his advice to Bazin after Ivan gifts him his coat: "Wear it and wish for something great". In a shot, this one line exposes Ivan's imagination, creativity, and drive, qualities that are underdeveloped in many of his peers. He must rely on these exclusively as he transitions between childhood and adulthood.

These are not the only two worlds Ivan must navigate between. He fancies Katya, a professor's daughter, who possesses an education and lives a life of luxury and propriety. Ivan serves as the messenger, transporting ideas from Katya's world of the well-to-do to his own gritty reality and vice-versa. This deeper metaphor, present in the film's title, is impossible to miss. The clash between the worlds of the poor and the rich, of children and adults, proves too much to handle for Katya, who disenchanted, rebels against her parents at a social gathering and plays Ivan's coarse and raucous tune for the roomful of adults.

Unlike his father, Ivan is responsible. He cares for his mother and thinks of the future. This is manifested into the form of a young man in uniform staring with eyes full of nostalgia at the gathering of children at the end of the film as Ivan stares back pondering if he would be treated to the same fate and wondering what the future will hold. All of Russia would be similarly apprehensive of what would come of Perestroika and Glasnost. I believe Ivan is Karen Shakhnazarov's answer.

What is happiness? What is the meaning of life? What is the Zone? And what exactly is reality? These questions and many more you will find yourselves asking as you enter the Zone, a place with a Room where all wishes come true. Don't expect too many answers, but try to enjoy the journey, even amidst the decay and ruin of both man and machine.

Tarkovsky's Zone is a place of magic, a place where ordinary physical laws don't apply. If one is skeptical that the scenery is what it is, and that there is nothing more to it than what you see with your eyes, the camera in conjunction with the dialogue works hard to convince you otherwise. Distance, scale, and position are all warped, not by any special effect of the camera as in ordinary sci-fi movies, but by the positioning, angle, and movement of the camera within a shot.

To take one harrowing example: In the early part of the journey to the Room contained within the central core of the Zone, the small company of travelers, the Stalker, the Professor, and the Writer, pass a blackened trailer containing intact fleshy skeletons. The camera tracks the travelers as they move from a vantage point that deliberately inserts this trailer of death in between. Ever so slowly it creeps up to the scene of death, enlarging and magnifying the details of the decaying corpses, until the camera, having just gotten past the point where it has crept so far up, then overshoots the dead. But it stops; so that while the travelers contemplate the fate of these dead "tourists" to the Zone, we are aware that we are actually sitting on top of them.

Metal armor, assorted trinkets, and other material possessions that man has donned or created all fall by the wayside and are discarded and rusted at the bottom of pools of water that saturate the Zone. Man's life and possessions are ephemeral and in a constant state of decay in our industrialized, bleak world. Man is removed from Nature, not just in Soviet life but everywhere we look. It becomes apparent that the only way to survive such ruin of both spirit and home is with faith and hope.

But we don't always know our innermost desires so a trip to the Room is fruitless if we have a specific goal in mind. The central dilemma is that the Stalker's faith is predicated upon his belief that the inner desires of most people are good. However, the Writer and Professor, from different but not necessarily opposing perspectives, espouse a view that their deepest desires may not necessarily have the best intentions, despite a basic sense of morality that pervades their respective consciences. This is what I think Tarkovsky was trying to depict, without giving an answer, since there may not be one in this brilliant, philosophical, haunting, and beautifully poetic meditation on what it means to be human in a particular reality that we can see but not really ever grasp.

If there was one allowable criticism one could make for A Railway Station for Two it would be the pace at which the main character, Platon Ryabinin, transforms himself from a "city-slicker" to a man quite comfortable with his surroundings in about no time at all. Even so, it's eminently forgivable when the romance between Vera and Platon is contingent on Ryabinin's adaptability, and the exposure the film gives to a detailed picture of Soviet life and its many idiosyncrasies.

Although the love story is predominately what drives the pace and rhythm of the film, other sub-themes regularly permeate the main story. Profiteering, the law and justice or the lack thereof, and social stances on gender equality dominate. Irony such as the following suffuses the story line: "Life depends not on those who are in charge, but those on duty." Or "why do you want to know what you'd better not know?" And then there is the acceptance of the vagaries and injustices of life: "Good people are always unlucky."

The story explores with a light, comedic touch two people from wildly different backgrounds, a pianist and a waitress, who meet accidentally at a train station. Platon is on his way to Siberia after taking the rap for a car accident in which his wife hits and kills a man who was possibly suicidal anyway. Vera 's husband has just walked out on her after committing adultery and announcing it on the apartment building's intercom. She then takes up with a black market profiteer until she and Platon meet. Their relationship becomes a study in how people from opposing backgrounds can still fall in love and take a chance despite the heartbreaks life throws at them.

What is critical to this beautifully rendered film is that despite the difficulties inherent In Soviet everyday life because of the system, everyone holds no grudges and tries to work together to overcome the bureaucratic stupidities. The film's most explicit point is that no one knows what anything, including themselves, is really worth to someone else. Whether its melons, carburetors or love, anything is possible in this witty, sometimes sad, and ultimately triumphant film.

Nine Days of One Year refers not to nine consecutive days but rather to the Narrator of the film cherry-picking nine important days in the lives of two nuclear scientists and the woman they both love. The movie is set during the recent thaw in the time of the Cold War and uses the same lead actor we saw in The Cranes are Flying, the great Alexey Batalov. The director, Mikhail Romm, strives to reveal a community that had been veiled during Stalin's years. Ilya, Gusev, Lyolya; three physicists connected by bonds stronger than friendship, are tasked with illuminating the mysterious world of science and technology that had (and is) often closed to the public.

An amazing achievement for its subject matter, the film was both produced and set in the time of the thaw; it is a film that claims in the very beginning through its Narrator that besides scientific inaccuracies committed here and there, all other facets of this movie are as close to representing the truth as possible. One can sense immediately that the film does not merely seek satisfaction in developing and propagating a story, whatever merits contained within notwithstanding (be it setting, theme, special mechanics, character development, dialogue, screenplay); it has incorporated a narrator to expedite the process while maintaining a basic necessary structure. The film instead yields many questions about the nature of scientific discovery and the potentially deadly consequences contained within those discoveries that affect both the scientific community and mankind at large.

In fact, so great is the feeling of impartiality in the presentation of these questions, an agenda so strong that the characters cease to be themselves and turn into the mouthpiece of a tangible abstraction, an unnamed character both invisible yet omnipresent. We first become aware of it when Sintsev's manic obsession with his work in the nurse's room gives way, suddenly, to a moment of complete clarity and sensitivity to Gusev, the man who had been exposed to 200 roentgens of nuclear radiation; Sintsev suggests that Gusev find a girl before it is too late. How very uncharacteristic of a man who was just earlier celebrating his scientific breakthrough and ready to keep working even though in Gusev's words "he had killed himself" due to the exposure.

Other times amid the scientific banter, theories, thought experiments and the like littering the movie, comes more transcendent ideas, detailing the correlation of scientific progress with the advent of war, a conversation played out by two scientists, whose conclusion is that the interests of science are aligned with those of war. Ilya and Gusev may be two more vessels for this omnipresent guiding voice while Lyolya seems to be purposefully granted immunity; for she is granted her own private thoughts, and is the one character who doubts herself as a scientist and instead thinks first of herself as a wife. Ilya questions the ultimate implications of scientific discovery and asks, "What good does it do?" Gusev, however, the character most immersed in the scientific realm and obsessed by his work, perhaps offers the greatest and strangest consolidation of the essence of the film. In a letter closing out the film, written to Ilya and Lyolya, he draws a picture of the three holding hands and asks to grab a bite to eat at a local café. The scene is a breathtaking exposition that humanity is more important than progress, which of course can be read as a refutation of the communist ideal.

Some surprising differences between Baltic Deputy and its Soviet contemporaries focusing on the revolution is where the battle between the proponents of revolution and those against it is staged, and who the combatants are. While war rages abroad, and gunfire erupts in the streets, there is yet more conflict in an unlikely place: the home of one Professor Polezhayev, a distinguished man specializing in plant physiology. While he is finishing his book on subject, he writes an article to the papers expressing a pro-Bolshevik viewpoint. From there on, he is antagonized by his students, abandoned by his friends, and even hindered in the publication of his book by his pupil of fifteen years. All from the immediate negative reaction from the one article.

Thus the battle is between intellectuals. Intellectuals are not considered the backbone of the party, and are ever mistrusted, and yet the film does find a place for Polezhayev (who is not a Bolshevik) to serve the needs of the party by extending his knowledge and discourse to the ears of the Proletariat. That such an idea should separate Polezhayev from the rest of the caste of intellectuals and in turn separate Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks or any other political affiliation is a preposterously shallow notion to put forth. It is unfathomable that some of the men and women who devote their lives to the attainment and dissemination of knowledge only do so with a mind to limit their potential audience to those who they can address as a "sir". Polezhayev's "narrow-minded" pupil, however, takes on the role of such a person. He cannot help but sneer at the thought of Polezhayev giving a lecture to sailors, refusing to do so himself. Additionally, Vorobyov makes every effort to block the publication of Polezhayev's book. There's no reason for this. A book on plant physiology cannot possibly support any political party.

Vorobyov only believes Polezhayev betrayed his principles when writing an article for the papers. In fact at the beginning of the film he had thought it high time the book was to be published before he read the article. Such inaccurate portrayals of the "enemy" made for a very cheap victory for Polezhayev and for the film's central thesis. Even the relationship between the sailors and Polezhayev the film tried to cultivate through the use of the motif of a "deputy", where Misha's assistant (a "deputy" of sorts) elects Polezhayev as the "deputy" representing the Baltic sailors at the Petrograd Soviet, falls flat as the two had very little interconnectivity throughout the film.

Watching Earth is an experience akin to stepping into a fairy tale, yet there is nothing extraordinary in the setting, characters, or events. A tractor arrives, bread is made, a man is killed. A primal force, that of nature itself, guides the action and story, all the while displaying its immense beauty.

To create this effect Alexander Dovzhenko employs two maxims. 1) He never rushes a scene. That allows the viewer to absorb either the actors' more or less laconic motions or else the shots of nature's bounty, including the fields of wheat, sunflowers and orchards, and develop an emotional response. 2) Often there is a response to the action in the village in the form of a shot of the aspect of nature. The tractor's arrival, anticipated by the villagers, is also being watched by the horses and cattle, who are awarded their own shot. The funeral procession is accompanied by the stampede of horses shown back to back with the moving crowd. Fruit laden branches gently caress Basil as the sunflowers seem to bow in deference.

Connecting the dominion of nature to that of man is the abundance of symbolism throughout. This evokes fertility and the renewal of life after death. But instead of an afterlife, it is the children that unexpectedly answer Peter's question of 'what happens after?' While Peter and Basil rest dormant in death, there is always a child, oblivious, eating a fruit supplied by nature.

The message of the film is a little more ambiguous, as Thomas and the priest are not so much condemned as they are marginalized and ultimately succumb to the 'new life'. Still, the development of the communal farm is linked strongly to the cycle of life, inevitable, and incontestable.

I knew it was coming shortly… the answer I couldn't bear to see. The Bolsheviks featured in history. To the victors go the glory, even in the face of war and death.

Well that's the ending, which comes slinking in to corrupt what would have been a legitimate effort to provide a synopsis of the preceding 20 years accompanied by both reasonably relevant and appropriate visual material. But don't suppose there was any nuance, oh no, the presentation of events both followed a linear progression and were manufactured to fit a revolutionary mindset - though their depiction under the eye of the camera leaves no room for bias. By the first half of the film it is sickening to watch as ever more of the officer corps and nobility flood the screen in their gilded uniforms of either white or black. While this effect is produced partly by sheer repetition (I could not help but close my eyes at one point and instead focus on Bach's Praeludium I which was playing in the background), all the manicured and clean faces of the gentlemen and ladies are sharply contrasted with the dirty peasants and factory workers working in the fields, plants, mines, and quarries while living in hovels. There is no denying that the divide between the upper classes and the common man is stark. The confidence that inspires in the ability and judgment of the Tsar to order the mass mobilization of the "cannon fodder" is correspondingly poor. The reality of war, through the bitterness of winter, featuring the explosions of artillery, the manufacturing of deadly weaponry, and the consequent death of millions, leads to the obvious conclusion: War must stop, and the Tsar must fall.

And so it was that in about 5 minutes of film the storming of the palace and abdication of Nicholas II was completed, power transferred, and regime undone. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, title of the film, is complete. We could have ended there, the next months of the story left to another documentary, but Esfir Shub decided to press on just as the war did even after February's revolution. The people are mustered and Lenin is seen, figurehead, all chanting "Bread, Peace, Freedom," the clarion call of the Bolsheviks.