'Ethics in America'
Cleary, Ambrose
POSITION HAS ITS PERKS 'TUNE FOR THE FLUTE' A Forgotten Tune for the Flute is one of several coming glasnost films: Russian productions that profit from the new atmosphere of freedom in the Soviet...
...The symbol of Filatov's new mood is that he begins to play the flute again-an instrument he had studied as a conservatory student before he married the daughter of the senior bureaucrat who kicked him upstairs into officialdom...
...But isn't this an old Russian story...
...We just offer suggestions...
...To some degree, Tune recalls other European films (e.g., 1974's The Middle of the World, by Alain Tanner) that examine the conflict between bureaucracy and free-spiritedness in modern society...
...In Filatov's upscale apartment, a large bottle of Cinzano stands prominently on the table.''Look at me," it seems to say, "I'm European...
...Several excellent scenes comically depict the continued lack of privacy in the Soviet Union...
...We never ban anything," he explains cynically...
...Director Eldar Ryazanov has photographed Tune to make Russia seem European, with plenty of shots of modern buildings and wide boulevards, juxtaposed with crowded open air markets, and narrow medieval lanes...
...Filatov falls in love with an actress and part-time nurse named Lida (Tatyana Dogileva...
...carrying on romantically, he realizes, could cost him his job...
...Tune fancifully comments on the change...
...The affair deepens him...
...The deadpan screenplay is amusing: at one outdoor art show, a voice on the PA system announces: "Will the woman peddling Hungarian pantyhose leave the grounds immediately...
...Too bad Ryazanov gets giddy on his own wit...
...In art or life, how often blithe spirits, freed from harsh restraint, seem to go to the opposite extreme...
...Its plot concerns a middle-aged bureaucrat (Leonid Filatov) at the "Leisure Time Directorate" whose main job is making arbitrary decisions about censoring art...
...Though no Stalinist, Filatov muddles along in the old ways, and in private fantasies about liberty...
...At one point, rejecting Filatov's advances, Lida declares: "You're taking advantage of your official position," to which he responds, "That's what it's for...
...Under glasnost, this film jokes, the directorate is genuinely confused about what to allow...
...In his new romantic mood, playing the flute makes him "open" up into real independence...
...A subplot about a chorus whom he flippantly sends off to the Black Sea also gets tedious, despite a hilarious scene where the group of zoftig sopranos in ethnic costume rises on the flight deck elevator of an aircraft carrier while serenading the crew...
...Fantasy sequences, initially surprising, turn predictable, as when Filatov's uncertainty about the direction of his love life goes on too long...
...But Ryazanov also spices Tune with a specifically Russian flavor, not just in the topical references to glasnost, but in a whimsical, somewhat annoying style...
...POSITION HAS ITS PERKS 'TUNE FOR THE FLUTE' A Forgotten Tune for the Flute is one of several coming glasnost films: Russian productions that profit from the new atmosphere of freedom in the Soviet Un-tion...
...Dad made a man of you, you piddling musician," Filatov imagines his sour wife saying to him in one of many Fellini-like sequences where Russians become so truthful that they adopt glasnost in their private lives...
...Filatov's clandestine love affair is presented as light mock-heroic, in which Ryazanov uses every interrupting knock on the door to echo scenes of nocturnal visits from the secret police...
Vol. 116 • February 1989 • No. 4
