ZERO CITY: If Buñuel had done time in a Communist country, this might well have been the result. |
| “The Films Of Karen Shakhnazarov” | Museum of Fine Arts | December 3-6 |
We take Russian films as we can find them these days, one at a time, whether they be the sand-blasting pulp epics of Timur Bekmambetov, the brooding melodramas of Andrei Zvyagintsev, or the annual beautiful but often frustrating offering by master enigmatist Aleksandr Sokurov. Vodkal driblets of psychotronica and metaphor and dreaminess, respectively, but no "Russian cinema" per se. Given the nation's current state of being — tugged into irritation by a corrupt and overbearing government, run in actuality by trade "oligarchs," and permanently confused about its renascent nationalism and new economic growth — one could hardly expect anything like a cohesive film culture, especially since the once-mighty state-supported industry has had to rebound from its post-Soviet crisis by way of private funds and scraps of government funding.Significant figures do loom, though mostly out of our stateside view — Aleksei German Sr. and Jr. are both making vital and extraordinary films, though nothing of their work has been released here. The same goes for famed cinema-of-cruelty doyenne Kira Muratova, who at 72 released her 18th film last year. A less ostentatious, and far more audience-friendly, Russian film mill is Karen Shakhnazarov, whose career stretches back to the '70s but who only now, in the Putin years, is being recognized as one of Russia's signature voices.
Perhaps his makeover began with ZERO CITY (1988; December 6 at 1:30 pm), something of a perestroika landmark that also stands in sharp relief to his usual thematic terrain. It's an absurdist, Kafka-esque comedy-without-laughs in which a Moscow engineer (Leonid Filatov) arrives in a small town to modify a tiny air-conditioner part, cannot get a straight answer, is met with all manner of surreal non-sequiturs (a naked secretary, a restaurant cake in the shape of the hero's head, a bolero of hyper-paranoid suspicions), and in the end realizes he can never leave. If Buñuel had done time in a Communist country amid his many exiles, this might well have been the result. But it also makes you wonder how any such scenario could ever have found textual roots without the enriching benefit of a psychotic totalitarian bureaucracy — or perhaps how such a social context adds ferocious weight and size to any symbolic narrative idea. Whatever: Zero City is a low-key, deliberately methodical walk through the subconscious life of the Soviet quotidian, and having watched it you walk away with a genuine sense of a cultural reality.
Shakhnazarov is otherwise a nostalgist with a particular attraction to the October Revolution and its precursor skirmishes, and a wry attitude toward life under the Soviet umbrella. JAZZMEN (1983; December 3 at 8 pm), in fact, exhibits a degree of satirical wiggle room — pre-glasnost — that can upend Western notions of Soviet cultural oppression. As broad and obvious and high-spirited as a Keystone Cops comedy, the film follows the rather formulaic travails of a young band of eager jazz musicians in the '30s who're surrounded by official culture (scaldingly mocked) that dubs them as decadent and Western but who eventually play Dixielandish bebop to huge audiences. From the Khrushchev thaw onward, the cinematic vision we get of Russian urban life has often been not so radically different from that in France or Sweden, but Jazzmen is a safe look backward compared with COURIER (1987; December 5 at 6 pm), which plants its feet in the late-perestroika present. Something of a generational touchstone that strove to speak for Russian youth just as the empire was crumbling, Shakhnazarov's movie — a coming-of-age teen saga in which an impetuous 18-year-old (Fyodor Dunaevsky) takes a job as a messenger, half-heartedly woos the beautiful daughter (Anastasia Nemolyaeva) of a famous writer, and generally pisses everyone off — is often awkward and unconvincing, but it also seethes with youthful ire. Not unlike Vasili Pichul's Little Vera (1988), Courier is less about crafting a narrative than about nailing down the discombobulated historical moment, from the cynical stance of teenagers fed up with the adult sphere's fuck-ups.
After Zero City, Shakhnazarov veered into the past, first with THE TSAR'S ASSASSIN (1993; December 5 at 7:45 pm), a supremely odd fable in which a contemporary mental patient (an entirely redubbed Malcolm McDowell) believes he is the Communist assassin of both Alexander II and Nicholas II (and the rest of the Romanovs); his delusions have a transformative effect, for reasons unknown, on his new doctor (Tarkovsky fave Oleg Yankovsky). The psychiatrist becomes convinced he's the last tsar, and we come share the characters' muddlement between what is the "past" and what is the "present," but the political ruefulness and the narrative point both seem half-baked. The filmmaker revisits the tsarist milieu with more determination in THE RIDER NAMED DEATH (2004; December 6 at 3:45 pm), which begins with a rather slovenly nod to the pre-WW1 underworld serial Les vampires and finishes on the same phrase from Revelation that gave its name to Elem Klimov's Belarussian death march Come and See. It's not a milieu we're over-acquainted with: 1905 Russia, when the various revolutionary forces and their radical terrorist arms were still gathering steam, busily bombing and assassinating officers, dukes, politicos, and diplomats.
