Daring Voices in Soviet Films

...It sounds like soap opera, but the women's everyday life is presented soberly, without adornment...

...The message is explicit: it is this kind of falsification and revisionism that brings the dead *The text of Repentance has not been published...

...Hands clench involuntarily when Nino and Kati, searching in a lumberyard for the names and locations of prisoners they've been told are carved into logs, watch the logs disappear in a cascade of sawdust...

...Both Medvedev and Lakshin emphasize the film's "general release," and for good reason...

...All the more surprising, then, is recent activity in the film world...

...Such an exorcism precludes excuses and rationalizations...

...In general, Soviet movies seem strongest when they are most realistic...

...It is a terrifying notion—the dictator who won't stay in his grave—and Abuladze exploits the dilemma of his present-day heirs skillfully...

...In one scene Abel's wife, lithe and graceful, dances at the side of Varlam's coffin—until Varlam, slowly putting on his glasses, looks about, pulls up his shroud as if it were a blanket, and turns on his side to get more comfortable for sleep...

...The Party man—conventionally a fount of all virtue— is next thing to a villain, inhuman in his cold rectitude and harmful to his own side because his intolerance precludes understanding (and making use of) the deserter...

...There are men and women in the audience old enough to remember people like the broken prisoner who tells Sandro, "We have to give [the investigators] thousands of names, to the point of absurdity—so many names that no one could possibly believe it...

...He is diabolical and supreme but not, in Abuladze's film, alone: illiterate thugs abet him, and so do sophisticated true believers who are caught in his spell until they too, inevitably, are arrested and vanish...

...People are astounded: "I never thought I would live to see this on a Soviet screen," said one sophisticated university professor...

...Repentance also signals Gorbachev's own position, and puts on notice representatives of the Stalinist mentality, which is alive and well in the party and government...

...But there is—in cultural matters, anyway—a real sense of excitement and possibility...

...Soviet movies routinely undergo a system of censorship at least as complicated and crippling as those that confound the other arts...

...Another film not long off the shelf, and consistently playing to packed houses, is Gleb Panfilov's Theme...

...Gorbachev needs the support of this small but critically important part of the Soviet population to make his reforms work...

...Her last film, completed before her untimely death a few years ago, is called Patsany (Kids...

...Given the distribution of Roadcheck, Theme, and Kids, above all the release of Repentance, that excitement doesn't seem to be wholly misplaced...

...SOME IMPRESSIVE RECENT SOVIET FILMS belong to the "gritty realism" school, and many come from the Leningrad film studio...

...Asanova shows, without overt moralizing, the wretched homes from which the boys come, but she doesn't exculpate the kids, and in one scene shows them in the grip of mob fever, on a destructive rampage through the camp...

...WHICH IS SURELY ONE REASON THE FILM has been screened...

...One is Agonia, Klimov's film about the Romanovs, which was released in the West under the title Rasputin...

...Certainly no hero, he is a complex character not wholly undeserving of sympathy...

...The release of Repentance is a major straw in the wind of changing times for experienced Muscovites...

...Now the general public has a chance to see the movie and judge for itself...

...One director, Dinara Asanova, made a number of fascinating studies of troubled adolescents, working with a stable group of adult actors and often using nonprofessionals for the kids' roles...

...REPENTANCE HAS TWO OVERLAPPING CENTERS, past and present...

...they are from notes scribbled down in the dark, from the Russian voice-over translation of the Georgian dialogue...

...In November two films by the recently deceased director Andrei Tarkovsky (of Andrei Rublev fame) were playing for the first time since his emigration several years ago...

...Though it is fashionable in certain Moscow circles to decry Repentance as artistically derivative (the influence of Bergman and Fellini is clear), no one who has seen the film denies its political and cultural significance...

...The audience holds its breath together with Nino and Sandro as they lie in a field, covered with clods of earth, while Varlam pursues them in a car and his henchmen, in medieval armor, give chase on horses...

...Until the end of January, despite official promises of distribution to theaters and eventually to television, Repentance had been screened only to select audiences in select places—the Writers' union club, the House of Cinema (Cinematographers' union club), the Artists' Union...

...Set in an imaginary country ruled by an imaginary dictator, Repentance insists that the only way to move forward is by exorcising the past...

...The result has been a large number of conservative, unimaginative, and formulaic movies...

...The protagonist is a famous and successful writer who, after a lifetime of hackwork, decides to write "honestly...

...Set in the ancient, beautiful town of Vladimir in winter, Theme depicts the artistic impotence that results from moral compromise...

...and who then throws back his head and howls...

...There are other straws...

...Oct...

...He himself never harmed anyone...

...In less than the blink of an eye his joviality turns to ice, his calm to hysteria...

...He harangues the crowds, demanding vigilance because "four out of every three people are our enemy...

...More romantic is another Leningrad film, made a few years ago, Winter Cherries...

...From conception to distribution, every film treads a minefield...

...Although the film itself ends with a compromise—a car wreck that gets the hero off the hook—it is a bitter indictment of an art that conforms to externally set standards...

...A brand-new film, for instance, is first-rate when it shows the Kirov Ballet company from the inside: there is a marvelous scene between the artists and the bureaucrats, who debate whether a ballet version of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita can be performed...

...Only the exceptional beauty of the lead actress, and the exceptional implausibility of her diplomat-suitor (an anti-Western caricature) disturb the realistic tenor of the film...

...But it is the scenes of the past that make Repentance emotionally devastating for Soviet audiences...

...No one who lived through the Khrushchev pe161 nod and its repressive aftermath, let alone the earlier years, is anything but skeptical...

...The "thaw" is advertised, if not in neon—which Soviet marquees eschew—then in the posters that adorn walls all over Moscow...

...The release of this movie," said Roy Medvedev in an interview with Washington Post reporter Celestine Bohlen, "will be the most important event in Soviet cultural life in at least a decade...

...Another, Roadcheck, is one of three movies made by the gifted director Aleksandr German...

...WEAK AND STRONG, realistic and fantastic, political and aesthetic are almost irrelevant categories when it comes to a film that was the sensation of Moscow this past fall, Tengiz Abuladze's Pokaianie (Repentance...

...With a toothbrush moustache like Hitler's and octagonal, rimless glasses like Beria's, with Stalin's sinister theatricality and profound paranoia, Varlam is an amalgam of dictators, an ur-dictator...

...For this fundamentally disaffected elite, a genuine examination of the past—and especially of the Terror, which carried off its parents and grandparents—is perhaps the only way to revive some sense of commitment...

...Three unmarried women, neighbors in an apartment house, share day care for their young children and daydream of love and security, seemingly forever out of reach...

...At the congress of the Cinematographers' union last spring, cinema workers expelled the hard-line old guard with a fervor unmatched by the Writers' (or any other) union, and elected the controversial director Elem Klimov as first secretary...

...A number of poets long in disfavor are giving readings and lectures and their work is beginning to appear in print...

...Don't we...

...But when Fuete (Pirouette) indulges in Felliniesque interludes—the prima ballerina drifting, in translucent dresses, over something resembling sand dunes crossed with cloud banks—the pirouettes fall flat...

...At Moscow's main exhibit hall, the Manezh, there have even been mélanges of rock music, mime, and recitation...

...It was complicated...

...It is an exceptionally sensitive, almost entirely unsentimental look at teenaged boys who get in trouble with the law and spend a summer in a kind of work camp under the tutelage of two social workers...

...But they are reasonably accurate...

...Zhivago, at long last, is scheduled for publication later this year, as is Anatoly Rybakov's novel about the Terror, Children of the Arbat...

...What is the fate of one man when the fate of millions is at stake...

...This past December the chairman of the cinematography committee of the union, Filipp Yermash—who prevented a sizable number of films from being released—was replaced by a man ten years younger and presumably less hidebound...

...We were surrounded by enemies...

...some, particularly young people, are downright cynical...

...The director's vision of the Great Terror pits Varlam, whose personal despotism is backed by the state terror machine, against the doomed artist Sandro, his wife Nino and his daughter Kati...

...In the "present" the middle-aged Abel is unwilling to face the legacy of his father until he is forced to by his own son's repudiation...

...After describing some of the politically daring plays on Moscow's stages, Medvedev added an appropriate caveat about the limits of "openness" imposed even nowadays...

...160 Varlam back to life, popping up in the garden, leaning against a tree, sprawled in an armchair...

...Abuladze deliberately blurs the line between the two by presenting flashbacks without any transition, by using the same actor (the brilliant Aftondil Makharadze) to play both the dictator, Varlam, and his son, Abel, and by introducing purposely jarring anachronisms and odd juxtapositions, like a judge who wears the mortarboard of a medieval academic and fiddles with a Rubik's Cube...

...Quotations are not verbatim...

...In chilling images Abuladze conjures up the stink of pervasive, hopeless dread...

...With people like her, the screening of Repentance has won Gorbachev more credit, and more wary trust, than all his five-hour speeches combined...

...Abel justifies Varlam's crimes: "Your grandfather did nothing bad...

...Repentance has had the greatest impact among the Moscow intelligentsia because of its artistic excellence, and because it so nakedly bares the Stalinist abscess...

...Films from the republics, especially from Georgia and the Baltic states, are widely considered to be of high quality, but in 159 Moscow they play only irregularly...

...Roadcheck depicts a Soviet deserter during the war...

...There are the plays Medvedev wrote about, and the movies...

...These audiences comprise the bulk of the Moscow artistic and intellectual elite, a disproportionately influential group...

...he flamboyantly jumps out of a window to leave a room and then, an impossible moment later, stands framed in the doorway of the room as if his movements obeyed different laws from the rest of us...

...At least a dozen movies made up to fifteen years ago but never distributed, are now in circulation...

...In the past such caveats would have applied to Soviet movies in spades...

...Varlam always had the interests of the populace at heart, but he wasn't always in control...

...The prominent literary critic Vladimir Lakshin used terms like "catharsis" and "eye-opener" in a piece published in late November and looked forward to the general release of Repentance...

...Often they hurt themselves with sentimental moralizing, ideological pugnacity, or studied artfulness...

...31, 1986...

...He is set off against two other creative figures, one a poet whose integrity cost him public recognition, the other an artist whose unwillingness to compromise has made him resolve to emigrate...

...Several poems of Nabokov's have been printed, and two of his early books are to be published this year...