Fascinating Russian movies highlight academic symposium

Monday, April 30, 2007

"It Doesn't Hurt," directed by Alexei Balabanov, stars Inga Strelkova-Oboldina, left.

By Barry Paris
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

You can take the melody out of the drama, but you can't take the social agenda out of Russian movies.

That's a free translation from academese to English of "Melodrama and Kino-Ideology," the esoteric title of 2007's Russian Film Symposium -- the ninth such animal -- co-presented by the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

In the bad old Soviet days, "genre" films -- gangster flicks, mysteries, buddy movies, romantic comedies and especially melodramas -- were dismissed by Communist authorities as "bourgeois." The only sanctioned genre was something called "socialist realism." Since the U.S.S.R.'s breakup, melodramas have been on the rise, but Russian melodrama differs from the Western variety, now as always, in its political implications.

The working thesis of this year's symposium is that "the ghost of ideology continues to haunt much of contemporary Russian cinema."

It's a fairly disingenuous notion. In fact, Soviet "socialist realism" films were melodramas, for the most part. It is the social and political issues, not Marxist "ideology," that continues to haunt Russian cinema. What's the big surprise?

The flaw and fly in the ointment of this symposium's thesis is its rigid academic definition of a decidedly unrigid genre. "Melodrama" is simply the subordination of characterization to plot, via stock "heroes" and "villains" whose exaggerated conflicts manipulate your emotions. But the social ills touched upon (sentimentally or seriously) in the course of those conflicts lead to realism -- socialist or otherwise.

"Ideology," after all, is a fancy word for political bent -- communist in the former U.S.S.R., capitalist in Hollywood. The Western variety was no less doctrinaire for being less systematic or less rigorously enforced. (They didn't actually kill you for violations here, the way they did with Meyerhold and Mandelstam there.) But legitimate socialist concerns were not thrown out (or discredited) with the good-riddance bathwater of Leninist-Stalinist communism.

It's a faux issue, complete with fora, the quaintly pretentious academic plural of "forum," before and after screenings -- but a good excuse to present four big 2006 Russian movies that have nothing (least of all "melodrama") in common.

Forget the fora (and flauna) and focus on the fascinating films, all with English subtitles, at 7 p.m. in the Melwood screening room, $6 admission:

"Transit" (Wednesday and Saturday), directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin: This huge, multi-character tale concerns the U.S. Lend-Lease program that provided Russian aviators with planes to fight the common fascist enemy in World War II.

It's set in remote Chukotka peninsula of northeastern Siberia in 1943. The Soviet air base there is surprised when the latest shipment of planes from their U.S. allies are flown in by pretty female pilots. The flyboys chat up the flygirls in Russian (never mind that the Yankettes can't understand a word they're saying).

This withering depiction of Soviet bureaucratic incompetence includes a subplot of the base commander -- driven mad by shellshock and alcohol -- who takes out his rage on his soldiers.

There's a plethora of soulful characters here, nicely atmospheric American music of the period, broad comedy, a love triangle and a murder mystery. Who could ask for more?

"It Doesn't Hurt" (Thursday and Sunday), directed by Alexei Balabanov: Three skilled misfits open their own full-service remodeling/interior design business out of a trendy-seedy "semi-squat" loft in St. Petersburg.

It's strictly outcalls only.

Perpetually broke partners Alya (Inga Strelkova-Oboldina), Misha (Aleksandr Yatsenko) and Oleg (Dmitri Dyuzhev) acquire a seductive client Tata (Renata Litvinova).

She's the grifter-mistress of a wealthy New Russian Mafioso (Nikita Mikhalkov) but is much more interested in Misha. He's wary: "You're an alcoholic and you'll make me one." She's Holly Goheavily -- free spirit -- who turns this "Tiffany" into "Love Story" with the revelation of her secret illness.

Love means never having to say you slept together in this portrait of restless, alcohol-drenched youth and the urban-chic Petersburg "set" that could never have existed under the commisars. Beware the sappy ending.

"Alive" (Friday and Sunday), directed by Aleksandr Veledinskii: A young soldier returns home from the Second Chechen war minus one of his legs, with predictable trauma and understandable alienation. On a redemptive journey of crime and punishment, he finds himself accompanied by the friendly ghosts of two comrades who were killed trying to assist him when he was wounded. Survivor guilt? Big time.

Is the film pro- or anti-war? You (like confused Russian audiences) must be the judge. Chechnya was (and still is) Russia's Vietnam -- as ongoing and hopeless as Iraq. This engrossing fil -- like "It Doesn't Hurt" -- is marred by a mawkish, cliche-based conclusion.

"Euphoria" (Sunday), directed by Ivan Vyrypaev: Set deep in the stark Russian steppes, this existential melodrama (that's oxymoronic) involves the strange, escalating attraction between a married man and a married woman (Polina Agureyeva and Pasha (Maxim Ushakov)) who briefly met at a wedding and now abandon everything, all to be with each other. The woman's daughter gets her finger bitten off by the family dog. Her loutish husband cuts off the stump with a scissors, shoots the dog, pursues the adulterous wife and lover.

Fun, huh? No -- but not so grim as it sounds. Full of silences but gorgeously filmed, long takes abounding with sweeping helicopter shots over rolling fields, panoramic vistas with recurring Wyeth-like images of rare humans in the wasteland. This is a mesmerizing tale of doomed eroticism, a combination of Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" and Dorothy's Kansas -- with no escape to Oz.

Schedule

All 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. films are screened in David Lawrence Room 106, University of Pittsburgh. Evening films screened at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, 477 Melwood Ave. For more information and plot summaries of Pitt films, go to www.rusfilm.pitt.edu.

Today

10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. -- Ekaterina Gorokhovskaia's "Man of No Return" (2006)

2-4:30 p.m. -- Andrei Kravchuk's "The Italian" (2005)

Tomorrow

10 a.m-12:30 p.m.-- Avdotyia Smirnova's "Relations" (2006)

2-4:30 p.m -- Ivan Dykhovichnyi's "Inhale-Exhale" (2006)

Wednesday

10 a.m. -12:30 p.m. -- Yuri Moroz' "The Spot" (2006)

7 p.m. -- Aleksandr Rogozhkin's "Transit" (2006)

Thursday

2-4:30 p.m. -- Boris Khlebnikov's "Free Floating" (2006)

7 p.m. -- Aleksei Balabanov's "It Doesn't Hurt" (2006)