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Year in Film: Risky business

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Kino pravda

Not seen enough, Andrei Konchalovsky’s UNCLE VANYA (1971; September 27 at 12:30 pm) remains the best Chekhovian film ever made — so melancholy it’s virtually mute, with huge, text-eliding silences. And Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR (1974; September 18 at 8 pm), a free-form tone poem about childhood, fathers, mothers, lost loves, personal apocalypse, and the sheer rapture of Tarkovskiite visual alchemy, stands as a unique autobiographical testament that’s never been out of print on US video. But who knows enough about Larisa Shepitko? Married to Elem Klimov, Shepitko became a Carole Lombard martyr after her tragic 1979 death in a car wreck, amid the shooting of her fifth feature. Her last finished film, THE ASCENT (1977; September 21 at 4 pm), is a confrontational Eastern Front war saga beginning with breathtaking confidence in the Belorussian forests, among Communist partisans running in the deep snow from Nazis and scrounging desperately for food. Subsumed by icy whiteness, two soldiers confront the wilderness, trade fire with distant enemy units, and land, wounded and starving, in a farmhouse full of children, just in time for a Nazi patrol to show up. Thereafter, it’s the most ethically hysterical POW drama ever made, in a frontier dungeon that becomes a fuming hothouse of betrayal and self-preservationist tension.

The one new film on display, Vera Storozheva’s TRAVELING WITH PETS (2007; multiple screenings October 3-23), is an austere indie about a slave-like young wife living at an outskirts train station, and how her closed world slowly opens up when she’s forced to take her unloved husband’s dead body into town. It’s sharp-eyed and wise, but even as new Russian films go (I’m fondly recalling Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4 and Alexei German Jr.’s The Last Train), Storozheva’s is skimpy on the ambition and passionate invention for which the national film culture is justly famous.

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