Change Your Image
vitaky2001
Reviews
Domicile conjugal (1970)
Staircase, infantilism, fantasy
Truffaut turns a banal story about a newly wed couple, the birth of their first child, young man's infidelity, their separation and reunion, into a fascinating study of conjugal universe. At first glance, the central characters Antoine and Christine may appear to be happy, yet, as the story unfolds one can see their difficulty of relating to one another. As is usual with Truffaut's films, Domicile Conjugal presents the viewer with a highly dense text that constitutes perhaps the director's greatest achievement in his life-long exploration of relationship between men and women.
Truffaut's central symbol in this film is staircase. The characters constantly go up and down stairs. The psychoanalytic meaning of it is clear enough and has in fact been used by Hitchcock, whose films Truffaut found inspiring. Downstairs, a lascivious neighbor tells Antoine that she is going to have him soon. Money (another key psychoanalytic symbol) is also exchanged below as Antoine reminds an oblivious mother to pay for the music lessons that Christine (a violinist) offers to her daughter. By contrast, upstairs is the space of high art (in addition to Christine, there is an opera singer living next door). It is also a space of conjugal relations, or rather an attempt at such relation. As the first strains between Antoine and Christine become apparent, Antoine brings home a portable winding stairs and makes Christine mount it when she practices her violin. Unlike Freud and Hitchcock, Truffaut never quite claims that the high and sunny floors of our personality are a mere cover-up for the dark recesses of basic instincts. Nevertheless, the constant ups and downs in Domicile conjugal suggest that marital life involves a lot of interaction between an individual's consciousness and the unconscious.
Antoine, an autobiographic central character of Truffaut's cinematic universe, is known to director's fans as a boy who never grew up. In his late twenties as in his early teens, Antoine is entirely in love with his fantasies. The film starts as he dyes a bunch of carnations red by adding a substance to the water in which the flowers stand. Eventually, his pursuit of the absolute red color (an absolute passion?) leads him to overdose and burn the flowers down. As Antoine and Christine lie in bed, he reveals his fantasy to her by reading an obscenity into a news paper column. Looking for a supposedly serious job with an American company, Antoine ends up occupying himself with piloting toy ships in a miniature haven arranged on a pond (Truffaut will use the same image later in his La femme a cote). A consummate egoist enchanted with his own inner world, Antoine embarks upon a graphomanic enterprise of writing a novel, which, in Christine's words, will be his childish revenge upon his parents (a reference to Truffaut's 400 coups, and its central theme of a parentless childhood).
The infantile nature of Antoine's character is also apparent from his reaction to the news of the birth of his son. Significantly, Antoine does not hear his colleague who tries to shout to him over a distance that he has a boy, and learns the sex of the child by looking through a binocular at a magazine picture featuring a boy and a girl that the colleague shows. Being absolutely self-centered, he tells neighbors about the news, phones someone, but forgets to bring flowers to Christine on a first post-natal visit. And then he projects his own fantasies upon the baby, envisions him as a Napoleon of the literary world, and declares that he will be his son's sole educator (which references Truffaut's fascination with the 18th century educational ideas in his L'Infant sauvage). Finally, Antoine also does not forget to name the boy Alphonse despite the fact that Christine liked a different name.
Yet, Christine is not very much different. The whole episode in which they disagree on the names for the baby simply suggests that fathers and mothers have different fantasies about their children, that men and women have different fantasies
He calls Christine his sister, daughter or mother, while she imagines herself as his woman/wife (note the opening episode, when grocer and newspaper vendor call the newly wed Christine "mademoiselle" and she insists on being called "madame"). Whereas Antoine's pillow book is about Japanese women, Christine reads about Rudolf Nuriev, a famous ballet dance who had recently defected from the Soviet Union. As she and Antoine break apart, she takes his photo with their child out of the frame and one can see Nuriev's face below.
Thus, the conjugal scenes in this film are a wonderful illustration of the idea that men and women take their fantasies with them as they go to bed. And yet, as Antoine's affair with the Japanese girl Kioyko demonstrates, pure fantasies are pure hell. Kioyko's foreignness indicates the impossibility of communication. The language is not the issue, as Kioyko speaks French. Yet, as Antoine soon discovers, it is impossible to converse with one's dream. As the screen of the French small talk disintegrates around him, Antoine finds himself alone with his pure fantasy of a woman, that is to say he finds himself alone pure and simple. For a garrulous Gaul like him, the silence of Antoine's last evening in restaurant with Kioyko proves to be a veritable torture from which he repetitively flees (upstairs!) to a telephone booth in order to TELL Christine that he loves her and kisses her tenderly. Yet, make no mistake: an ironic last episode of the film demonstrates that love between a man and a woman is a purely ritual thing that does or does not exist only for an external observer. Truffaut's bottom-line is that men and women are able to live together only when their fantasies do not clash with one another. Forever children, men and women play out their dreams together or alone. As Jacques Lacan argues (and Truffaut agrees), there can be no SEXUAL relationship
Pro urodov i lyudey (1998)
Geometry of desire
Sade. Geometry was the pervert marquis's true passion and so it is for the director of this film. In the pornographic writings of the famous prisoner of Bastille, desire is abstracted into highly complex angular figures composed of pleasure and pain-seeking bodies. Likewise, Balabanov loathes primitive melodramatic triangles and presents the viewer with a decagon. The result is an aesthetic study of that particular blend of suffering and pleasure, of exhibitionism and voyeurism, of evil and good
of freaks and men, that no number of spoilers in this review can compromise the pleasure of watching.
The film starts with a triptych as the viewers are presented with Yohan (a clandestine pornographer in early 20th century St. Petersburg), a little girl Liza who will grow up into his Justine and a pair of Siamese twins adopted by the unhappily married doctor Stasov (they will become pornographers' prey too). Nevertheless, the key to Balabanov's contemplative pleasure is symmetry. His characters form symbolic (and real) pairs that interact with one another. In this symmetrical structure there is hardly a development that does not involve or is not brought about by any given couple of personages.
Engineer Radlov and Doctor Stasov are friends and heads of the two households who will see the end of their happiness and meet their own ends as a result of encounter with the corrupting world of pornography. Both are well-meaning naives: the former dies from heart attack after learning that his shy daughter Liza exposes herself in masochist compositions before camera. The latter is killed never realizing that his unloving wife with the misty unseeing eyes does the same.
The chambermaids of the two houses, Grunya and Daria, serve as a conduit of corruptive influence. The latter is an eager model of the pornographers that seduces the Siamese twins. The latter is a secret mistress of engineer Radlov to whom he bequeaths his property and custody of Liza not knowing that Grunya is in fact Johan's sister.
Yohan has an alter ego in the person of his assistant, an aspiring pornographer Victor Ivanovich. Yohan is a foreigner who features thick hair, an unsmiling countenance and cold autistic eyes warmed only by the masochist spectacle. Victor Ivanovich could not be more Russian in both name and appearance, is absolutely bold and always eerily cheerful. Whereas the object of Yohan's voyeuristic passion is Liza, Victor Ivanovich dreams of the Siamese.
The inseparable brothers are in a way the key element of the entire composition. Most unmistakably twins of all the paired characters, Kolia and Tolia embody the lighter and the darker side of human nature. The latter succumbs to the lure of the chambermaid's bare breast, while the latter indignantly rejects it. Forced to a glass of vodka before the first filming, Tolia eagerly takes to drinking, whereas Kolia remains virtuously sober to the very end. This makes the twins emblematic of that peculiar blend of humanity and freakishness - displayed by nearly each character and face in the film – that provides Balabanov's philosophical bottom-line.
Yohan's old and half-witted nanny who delivers punishment in the masochist mis-en-scenes and the young director of photography Putilov constitute the final pair. They stand at the opposite ends of the camera and facilitate the spectacle in a purely technical way. The former is Liza's whip wielding nemesis, who seems to be unaware of her role; the latter is her self-proclaimed saviour, who defaults on his promise. Having failed to extricate Liza from the squalid net of which he is himself an element, Putilov disappears and immediately thereafter Johan's nanny dies.
The disappearance of this pair announces the implosion of the entire decagon. Yohan collapses in an epileptic fit (a kind of temporary death), whereas Victor Ivanovich meets his real death at the hands of Kolia, who fires a gun picked from Yohan's pocket in an attempt to save Liza, whom he desperately loves. Released from the grip of the geometry of desire, Liza parts with Kolia (and, of course, Tolia). She takes the train to the West (something that she contemplated since the beginning of the film), while they board and eastbound ship in order to realize their intent to find their father.
The train and the ship, or rather the engine and the boat, in fact constitute an additional (non-human) symbolic pair. Periodic appearances of engine on the screen (engineer Radlov's house stands near a railway) announce new episodes in Liza's pornographic career. A steam boat takes Yohan and Viktor Ivanovich to each new accomplishment in their sordid activity. Both the engine and the steamboat represent the antagonistic unity of fire and water, water and metal, metal and fire
To be sure, humanity is always chased by its freakish shadow which is suggested by the film's soundtrack. Never reaching the South-East Asia, the Siamese end up on a concert tour around Russia performing the same song about train that they rehearsed before their soon-to-be-corrupted adoptive mother. Tolia drinks himself to death and is bemoaned by Kolia, who is sure to follow his brother in a short time.
In an unidentified "western" town to which the engine takes her, Liza hears the same melody that accompanies the opening scene of the film - the countess's aria from Gretry's Richard the Lion Heart. Popularized in Russia by Tchaikovsky, who included it into his Queen of Spades, the aria expresses the irresistibility of desire. Accordingly, Liza heads for the local red light district where she is seduced by a leather-clad male prostitute with a whip in his hand. Back in St. Petersburg, Yohan steps on the melting ice of the Neva river, after watching for the very last time the film with his nanny whipping Liza's bottom. Masoch
Kosmos kak predchuvstvie (2005)
A film about cosmos
Anticipation. The main character Konyok is an homo sovieticus. This does not mean that Konyok is a Soviet ideology dupe. It means simply that Konyok's does not have any self, other than the one that consists of Soviet role models, dreams, attitudes and the sense of time. The temporality in which he lives is particularly Soviet and is determined by anticipation, not necessarily of the "radiant communist future", but simply of something new, positive and slightly mystical. Such an anticipatory mood was quintessential to being Soviet. This "being towards the future" is captured in the film's title by the word predchiuvstvie, and can be easily "lost in translation" both in the direct sense (the English title of the film) and in the figurative sense (the reception of the film by Western viewers). Remarkably most of the words that the dictionary suggests as a translation of predchiuvstvie have a negative connotation (presentment, apprehension, foreboding
), whereas the Russian word is neutral and in this particular case has a positive meaning.
At the beginning of the film Konyok befriends Gherman, an athletic stranger (Gherman - German - a foreigner) with a shade of secrecy about him. Konyok instantly turns Gherman into a personal hero and becomes almost homoerotically attracted to him. Gherman has many identities all of which provided role models for Soviet children and youth: he passes for a rig up man, a secret agent, or a would-be cosmonaut (the story takes place immediately after the Soviets launched Sputnik and were about to send the first man to space). Gherman bears the name of the second man whom the Soviets sent to space – Gherman Titov. At the end of the film, Konyok encounters a young pilot Yuri on a train (and there is little doubt that this is in fact Yuri Gararin – the first Soviet cosmonaut).
Cosmos. The film is thus about "cosmos". The director views Soviet dreams about travelling to space as an expression of the desire to escape. German in fact contemplates escape from the USSR by coming to this Soviet port near the Soviet-Finish border. He has a radio and listens to foreign broadcasts, which he, knowing no English, does not understand. A Norwegian vessel anchored off the Soviet shore (symbolizing the West) attracts him not unlike a liner attracts the characters of Fellini's Amarcord, but its night lights prove to be just as illusive. Gherman plunges into the sea and disappears after telling Konyok that, in fact, he used to be a prison inmate, who planned to escape with a friend but lacked courage to do it at the decisive moment.
Konyok likewise escapes the gritty Soviet sea port and goes to Moscow. His girlfriend anticipates a diplomatic career for him and envisions him an ambassador in Brazil (can there be anything more escapist?). At the end of the film Konyok escapes from the crowd of spectators who assembled along the route of a triumphal cortège taking Yuri Gagarin to Kremlin and breaks through the militia cordon to present a bunch of flowers to the first cosmonaut (an episode taken from life). Yet, as Gherman's drowning earlier in the film suggests, there is no escape from the Soviet homeland and the film concludes with a Stalin-era song "Migratory birds are flying" that has the lines "But I stay with you/my dear country,/We do not need the Turkish shore/ and we do not need Africa either."
Being a study of the cultural meaning of space exploration in the USSR, the film also engages the theme of "cosmos" in a deeper metaphysical sense. Cosmos is surely more than the sum total of the existing objects. It is this sense of intimation of reality behind things, a cosmic feeling that makes this film a wonderful specimen of the popular genre of mystical realism. Cosmos transpires in foggy landscape (the director in general seems to aestheticise vaporous clouds, see his more recent film The Edge), in which the objects loose their identity as well as in the formless sounds that accompany the reflections of light in the dark waters. Midway into the film the main characters watch their blurred features in the hall of distorted mirrors and loose the contours of things in the dizzying spinning of an amusement ride. Pursuing the illusive beacons of the Norwegian vessel (and the West), Gherman plunges into the sea and looses himself in its elemental, cosmic enormity. Riding a bicycle into the future, the cheerful Konyok several times is shown to disappear in a similarly in-discrete, cosmic mist. Yet, unlike Gherman, he escapes not so much from a place, as from the present. As a typical homo sovieticus, Konyok lives towards the future and this makes him the real cosmonaut. For cosmos can only be anticipated
Oh, I forgot to say that the film is actually a love story and that the girls are a pleasure to watch!
Gruz 200 (2007)
A film that violates
Here is what Balabanov wants to tell us. "Russian people" (Aleksey) drinks, believes in God and dreams of the City of the Sun. "Russian people" sat in prison in the past (reference to the Gulag) and remains indebted to "political regime" (Captain Zhurov). The latter of course is a mockery of the Soviet propaganda's idea that people "owe" a lot to Soviet power. Zhurov commits a crime by killing a Vietnamese (which can be read as the regime's crimes against the non-Russians), but it is the "people" (Aleksey) who become inculpated and executed. "Remember, you owe me something," says Captain Zhurov ("political regime") to Aleksey ("the people").
"Russia" is represented simultaneously as a mother (Captain Zhurov's alcoholic mother), a wife (Antonina, Aleksey's wife) and a bride (Angelica). Political regime turns "Russia-as-mother" into a hopeless degenerate (through alcohol and TV addiction). Then, political regime turns "Russia-as-wife" into a widow (the execution of Aleksey – "the people") and finally it violates "Russia-as-bride". It first presents "Russia-as-bride" with a dead corpse of her bride-groom (paratrooper killed in Afghanistan (or Chechnia?)). Since, "political regime" (and Captain Zhurov) is sexually impotent and cannot substitute the bride-groom, it has an ugly criminal (urka) violate "Russia-as-bride" (Angelika) and then completes the girl's torment by reading her the letters of the dead fiancée (Soviet propaganda's cynical play on the sacred feelings?). "Political regime" professes love to "Russia-as-bride" but opines that this love is unrequited. Antonina ("Russia-as-widow") kills Captain Zhurov (a reference to Russian rebellion), but that of course does not restore the lost purity of Angelica ("Russia-as-bride") Russian rebellion is, after all, bloody and senseless.
The crucial thing is that the story does not show the way towards redemption. The teacher of "scientific atheism" (Artem) comes to the Church to be baptized, but the sacrament (if it really happened) remains off-screen. The bottom-line is that political regime is a sadist violator from which there is no escape.
In the end, what effect did the director seek to achieve with such a representation? Only one: he wanted the viewer to have the feeling that it is he or she who has (is) been violated. Both the rape featured in this film and the symbolic rape that is stands for, serve to obscure the fact that the actual rape happens in the course of watching the film and that the real rapist is not Zhurov (political regime) or its proxy (criminal), but the film itself. Its goal is to turn the people watching it into a raped subject and thereby complete the material, moral and psychological destruction that the country has experienced for a quarter of a century. It imposes upon the viewer a socio-political imagery (characters and relations between them) which deranges the mind, paralyzes the will and renders meaningless any action. It is the deadliest film I have seen in my life. It should have been cut to pieces and its director placed into a mental asylum, for, needless to say, the fantasy of inescapable rape could emerge only in a profoundly diseased mind.