Soviet Cinema: A Day of Repentance
Woll, Josephine
When I saw the Soviet film Repentance in Moscow last year, it was still being withheld from general distribution. Since it could only be seen at private screenings in places like the Writers...
...He doesn't speak for one or another group of victims, he speaks for all the victims...
...We have no more papa," she tells Kati...
...Solzhenitsyn, in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle, tried to broaden the impact of that approach by creating a whole society out of the polyphonic voices of prisoners (and, in Cancer Ward, patients and medical staff...
...That is Abuladze's accomplishment...
...He can shut the door, but he can't shut him out...
...They have been told they might find Sandro's name and whereabouts on the logs...
...He bursts in on his parents' soirée, shouting despairingly, "I don't have the strength for all these lies...
...I was eight when he became active in city life, . . ." Kati begins...
...Abuladze decided to recreate the Stalin era and its moral consequences through a blend of realism and fantasy, blurring the conventional barriers that separate past and present, spectator and actor, farce and tragedy...
...Wives learn that they are widows, their children orphans, when they move to the head of the line and give the window clerk a letter or parcel, only to be told: "Sent away without right of correspondence...
...It may not be "real," but it is "true...
...Michael, a Bukharin-like figure, is brought in to admit his guilt: "I had to dig a tunnel from Bombay to London...
...She wants to shout her "crime" to the four winds, so everyone will know what she has done and why...
...I hate you— and everyone...
...Left alone with Sandro, Michael confides his strategy: "We have to give thousands of names, to the point of absurdity, so many names that no one could believe it...
...We poisoned corn...
...What is the fate of one man when the fate of millions is at stake...
...It is extraordinary that a movie like Repentance was made in the Soviet Union in the years before glasnost, and Abuladze has given credit to Foreign Minister Eduard Shevarnadze for suggesting that the film be made for Georgian television, thus bypassing the worst bureaucratic channels...
...When Abel speaks of the Devil/Deity he has avoided facing ever since childhood, we understand and appreciate what he is saying...
...After inspecting the paintings and singing an aria to the oom-pa-pa accompaniment of the two thugs who flank him, Varlam departs by jumping out the window...
...SPRING • 1988 • 167 GLASNOST WATCH Repentance is built out of incongruities, beginning with the first shots of an aproned woman decorating cakes with miniature spunsugar churches while a bearded man—her husband...
...That same night Nino dreams that she and Sandro are running from a Varlam who can pursue them everywhere, into the earth itself...
...Her story unfolds in a flashback occupying half the film, a mixture of grotesque humor and chilling pain...
...the scheme succeeds so long as the action is confined within rigid spatial limits—in the camp, sharashka, hospital...
...The boy's explicit accusations and his response to his father's feeble and ultimately unavailing defense suggest the fearful consequences for a society that builds its present and future on a past of lies...
...it is the infamous line Anna Akhmatova describes in her great poem "Requiem," familiar to educated Soviet readers from its samizdat circulation and finally, twenty-four years after its publication in the West, printed last spring in the Soviet Union...
...Since it could only be seen at private screenings in places like the Writers Union, it had the cachet of the (relatively) inaccessible...
...Abuladze's choice is different...
...Once the door of the paddywagon slams behind Nino, Abuladze cuts back to the courtroom, where Kati proclaims that she will never allow Varlam to rest, covered and protected, in the earth...
...Women slog through mud and slush amid piles of logs, examining each cut end for a message etched into the wood...
...Together they embody human love, spirituality, and intellectual freedom: their disappearance is inevitable...
...Don't we...
...The camera moves from his dangling feet up to his head: a hanged Christ in a rank Gethsemane...
...Like Chaplin in The Great Dictator, like Voinovich in "A Circle of Friends," Abuladze demythologizes the Tyrant-God by making him look ridiculous...
...he doesn't restrict himself to one of the many phases of terror between 1929 and 1953, he encompasses Terror, abstracting it from a real time and a real place and thereby— paradoxically —making it palpable...
...The eight-year-old Kati is entranced by the spectacle, until her father leads her in from the balcony and, after locking gazes with Varlam for a long moment, shuts the door on him...
...Varlam's vampy daughter-in-law, a slinky dress, fur stole, and diamond necklace...
...But Abuladze's choice of allegory and fantasy to recreate the experience of Stalinism was not, I think, imposed upon him by the exigencies of Soviet censorship...
...On Nino's birthday Varlam visits uninvited, draped in fur and bringing flowers, a caged bird, and a crucifix...
...With fanatic exaltation she raises her eyes to the radiant future and sings the "Ode to Joy," which swells and fills our ears as Nino, with a clarity of vision worthy of Koestler, sees Sandro sloshing through inches of water down a cavernous tunnel, his hands bound behind his back...
...they come for Sandro the man ("You must come with us, not for long, if you please") and for the civilization he symbolizes, collecting his paintings and fingering the piano in whose glossy surface their armor is reflected...
...He is led into a garden full of yellow goldenrod, red poppies, and green weeds...
...Her fingers caress the Georgian letters as if they were the features of his face, while her lips move in soundless loving murmurs...
...Seconds later, as Sandro and Nino exhale with relief, their front door is flung open: Varlam, having defied all normal laws of time and motion, stands there grinning like a Cheshire cat...
...9,700 people helped me...
...The central paradox begins with Varlam's corpse, which won't stay dead, or at least buried...
...It was complicated...
...Of course...
...She has been digging him up and, when brought to court, pledges to continue digging him up...
...Her friend Elena, one of Varlam's believers, offers her the comfort that both Sandro and Michael have been arrested by mistake: "As our aims are grandiose, so will be our mistakes...
...That was what Iurii Trifonov did in his best fiction, what Georgy Vladimov did in his brilliant novella about a camp guard dog, Faithful Ruslan, what Anatoly Rybakov does in Children of the Arbat...
...her beautiful mother, Nino, is Womanhood incarnate...
...They are the only colors, nature's beauty contrasted to the white piano standing in the midst of the garden and the black and white clothing of the interrogator and the elegantly clad blindfolded figure of justice...
...They cannot defeat the omnipotent, omnipresent Varlam, who can subordinate even nature to his power...
...This is courtroom as theater: Kati wears an elaborate white costume with a fashionable, wide-brimmed hat...
...We were surrounded by enemies...
...She is perhaps fortunate in not seeing, asleep or awake, Sandro under pressure to confess his "crimes...
...As light dawns, Varlam's thugs knock at the door...
...That confrontation is a large component of what Abuladze wants to say in Repentance...
...For me, however, it is the least successful part of the film, because it is exclusively realistic and explicitly tendentious...
...In the most powerful scene in Repentance Kati and Nino go to the railway yard, where 168 • DISSENT GLASNOST WATCH lumber arrives by freight train from—we infer—the camps...
...There is no dialogue...
...The dream is real enough...
...By regarding realism as only one mode of depicting reality, he enlarges the scope of the film in order to fabricate an integral experience...
...We poisoned the whole population...
...The funeral is an occasion of ludicrous pomp: mourners resembling mafiosi chieftains and consiglieri pay homage to the padrone's heir, mumbling cliches...
...There is no way of knowing when the action occurs in "real" time—undefined past merges with undated present...
...The spoliation of Varlam's tyranny includes the individuals whose death he engineers (Sandro, Nino, their friend Michael, who was once Varlam's equal, then his acolyte, then his victim) and a mass of nameless citizens and their families...
...Some Americans, certainly sympathetic to the "message" of Repentance, have also come away from it disappointed and wondering if the film was lauded chiefly because no one expects so openly anti-Stalinist a movie to come from the Soviet Union...
...But Varlam's grandson, a sensitive teenager, has been listening, hard...
...Nino wakes with a start...
...The more common approach hews to strict canons of realism, eschewing adornment and ornamentation that would keep the ugliness at one remove and hereby falsify it...
...But Nino does "see" her husband's death...
...a friend?—wolfs them down as he reads the obituary of the city's former ruler, Varlam...
...Varlam always had the interests of the populace at heart, but he wasn't always in control...
...I thought then, and I think now—after seeing it twice more on inferior videocassettes—that one cannot separate where it was made from what it is, and that Tengiz Abuladze's film is both important politics and powerful art...
...In this theater of real life, the judges wear medieval British-style wigs and mortarboards, but one of them fiddles with a Rubik's cube...
...Most Soviet friends who had managed to see it recommended it highly, but a few spoke disparagingly of heavy-handed symbolism, invoking Fellini and Bergman as director Tengiz Abuladze's aesthetic masters, and complaining that he'd not really fashioned a style or voice of his own...
...She herself is arrested soon after...
...The culprit turns out to be Kati, the cake decorator of the first scene...
...When the action moves into a wider world, the effect is rarely sustained, often verging on caricature...
...it is he who takes refuge in a kind of catatonia when all his father can offer are cliches: "Your grandfather did nothing bad...
...These scenes depend for their impact largely on unambiguous words, whereas elsewhere in the film Abuladze's acute eye creates visual images whose ambiguity allows for a much more complex rendering of reality...
...It is admirable and it works, but one of its limitations is that it can recount the experience of only one particular victim or group of victims...
...a bearded hunchback recites a poem in praise of Varlam...
...Abuladze cuts from the face in the newspaper—octagonal eyeglasses, beaming smile—to the mass of red carnations blanketing Varlam's coffin...
...One lucky woman finds her husband's name...
...Instead, she is declared insane, a neat (and all too familiar) way of keeping her quiet and Varlam in his grave...
...But when the dead Varlam slowly puts on his glasses and looks about before he pulls up his shroud as if it were a blanket and, turning on his side, gets comfortable for sleep, we—spectators, viewers— are afraid, afraid that this ghost cannot be laid to rest, that this nightmare cannot be woken up from...
...Interred three times, it materializes three times, large as life and twice as unnerving...
...Kati's father, Sandro Baratelli, is a painter who tries to save the monuments of past culture and civilization...
...q SPRING • 1988 • 169...
...Nino is not so fortunate: finding nothing, she sits wearily, hopelessly, amid a cataract of sawdust with her arms around her daughter...
...Absurd, of course...
...there is no need for dialogue...
...It is he, symbol of the young, who challenges his father, Varlam's son, Abel...
...A broken pipe sprays a torrent of water in front of the rostrum at Varlam's inaugural celebration, drowning out the speakers both visually and audibly, while workmen try with slapstick abandon to cover the leak with their bodies...
...It is the infamous lie doled out like sugared poison to thousands of Soviet women in 1937-1938...
...Serious Soviet artists tend toward one of two modes to convey the Stalinist years...
...Absurd...
...Which one is on stage, which in the audience...
...Only an artist could make us feel that fear in our guts as well as understand it in our heads...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
