Russian Film Week.

In Yuri's Day, which opened Russian Film Week last Friday at the Ziegfeld Theater, Liubov, an opera singer working in Vienna, drives to her hometown in rural Russia with her handsome peevish son in the back seat of her Mercedes Benz sedan. It's meant to be a reality check for the privileged young gentleman, yet there's not much with which to reconnect in the snow and fog. The cops barely do any work. Things unravel when the mother and son visit a vast monastery and young Andrei goes missing, and Yuri's Day becomes a mother's desperate search for the young man, taking us to the extremes of Russian rural life in its oft-caricatured harshness and brutality.

Yuri's Day and most of the films at Russian Film Week (there is a comparable series in London, with some of the same films, that runs through September 29) are not movies that are likely to see US distribution. They are well-attended by expatriate Russians, leading to the conclusion that the films play to Russian tastes, no matter how unusual these tastes might be.

You've seen much of Yuri's Day before, or read stories like it. The script couldn't be farther away from the blithe reflections of bored characters in plays by Chekhov. Director Kirill Serebrennikov takes a turn into sociopathology, as beautiful Liubov (Kseniya Rappaport), stranded in the provinces, takes refuge with a museum guard who is beaten bloody by a man every day - all represented as a logical part of small-town depravity. Liubov has deep roots here, we learn, and a criminal past of her own, which now has an operatic patina. Dressed in a fur wardrobe that deteriorates as the story unfolds, and singing from time to time in an alto voice that follows the movement of her lips, more or less, she ventures everywhere in this black hole of a town (a white hole in the snow, actually), which becomes a sociology primer for every urban Russia prejudice about provincial life. Ridiculed in a workingman's bar, scorned in a monastery where she thinks her son has fled, and surrounded by infected thugs in a prison for criminals with tuberculosis, she is accompanied on these rounds by a fatigued cynical detective. Once Liubov is in crisis, marked by predictable anguish, the little town becomes quite a metropolis of freaks, compellingly shot by Oleg Lukichyov.

Bear in mind that this isn't even the Gulag, but it's Everyman's Russia in vivid screen mythology. Add a mother's despair, a violent cocktail of alcohol and blood, and a cast of stock characters, and you have a picaresque melodrama - 137 minutes of it - that the Russian-speaking audience in the theater with me enjoyed.

Just as unlikely to come to a theater near you if you're in the United States is the bawdy farce Hitler Kaput! (something tells me that they would have used Springtime for Hitler if that hadn't already been taken), which propels political incorrectness to new heights, or lows, depending on your taste. It's understandable that every country would like to cash in on its own version of The Producers, and Russians suffered disproportionately during the dark years of Nazi occupation. Who better to make dark jokes about that period, if your goal is to exploit this tragic time for comedy?

Marius Veisberg's film opens as a Jewish concentration camp prisoner, with striped uniform and yellow star, is hauled by a gang of Nazi executioners to a courtyard where the soldiers stand him up against a wall. In borscht-belt style, with a dash of Woody Allen, he tells the death squad that his doctor has urged him to avoid "any execution-related activities." They shoot him, nonetheless, and... they miss - this is a farce after all - but the shots create a hole in the form of the prisoner's silhouette in the wall, which falls through, opening into a room where - in case you haven't guessed - a shapely woman is taking off her clothes. And those are just the first few minutes.

In Veisberg's farce - which, he cautioned the audience before the screening, is not a "festival film," i.e., a movie of merit or artistic quality - Pavel Derevyanko plays Shura Osechkin, a Russian spy known as Shurenberg, who greases corrupt Nazi palms for just about everything as the war is nearing an end. The story is a vaudeville parade of crazy anachronisms, from rap emanating from the car that Shurenberg drives around Berlin (the shameless film is also a shameless promotion for Russian pop bands) to a Hitler salute contest, in which judges give scores, Olympic-style, to gymnasts who finish elaborate somersaults with "Heil Hitler!" When Shurenberg crosses back to Russian lines, with a beautiful blonde whom he's just rescued, one of the guards says: "They're lucky they're not Muslim." The audience was gasping in disbelief when it wasn't laughing at jokes that remind us that Russian satire is a lot darker than its American equivalent. Can you top this? Mel Brooks certainly can't. I'm sure that another Russian director will try.

This being a Russian Film Week, there was gushing sentiment as well as black humor. A case in point was Heavy Sand, by Anton Barshchevsky, which saw its world premiere, excepting a screening in Israel, on Sunday night. The adaptation of the enormously popular epic novel by Anatoly Rybakov (Children of the Arbat), set in a Ukrainian town through the entire last century, is distilled from a series of even greater epic proportions that will run on Russian television. (The feature film runs from 1900 through the war years.) Once again, much of the action is seen through the eyes of an aggrieved woman, Rachel (Irina Lachina) a suffering Jewish mother, whose suffering just seems to worsen with the passage of time - not that this trajectory of pain isn't accurate. Cut down with choppy editing to almost three hours from a much longer series of episodes, it's pretty standard melodrama, just mercifully shorter than the TV saga.

- David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at September 24, 2008 12:43 AM