AFONYA (Georgi Daneliya, 1975)

A Soviet tragicomedy written wonderfully well by Aleksandr Borodyanskiy and directed by Georgi Daneliya at a fast clip, at least in its urban phase, Afonya charts the slippage into regretfulness of an “indifferent,” self-absorbed 42-year-old plumber who drinks excessively, including on the job, and pursues one woman after another, without giving much thought to them. His fantasies reveal the impossible  idyllic life he desires to root out the general dissatisfaction that is the foundation of his oblivious, borderline hedonistic existence. Its immense popularity suggests that the film struck chords of recognition in Russian audiences.

Afanasy Nickolaevich Borshchov—“Afonya”—is this protagonist. Early on, Afonya brings home Kolya, that night’s drinking companion, and his irate girlfriend, who has been waiting for his arrival for hours, blows a fuse, jabs him repeatedly, throws Kolya out twice, and declares she has wasted two years of her life with him before leaving Afonya for good. This is the hilarious trigger for Afonya’s descent into a darker disposition, the feeling that his life is slipping away from him and that he missed opportunities in the past that might have shored up things now. Borodyanskiy and Daneliya do not overtly criticize either Soviet society or culture, but almost every moment shimmers with analytical import underscoring the relevance of this portrait beyond the confines of a character study. Afonya possesses the contextualization and breadth that something like, say, Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966) lacks.

Afonya keeps losing. No students are assigned to him because he is presumed to be incapable of training any budding plumbers properly. He begs for students; but the two boys who are assigned to him beg off from him after just one day. This loss of potential surrogate sons introduces to us Afonya’s likely despair at not having actual children of his own. Rather, A fantasy he has of being married includes a backyard of numerous children arranged in a row.

His wife in this fantasy, it turns out, in reality has no interest in him, a mere plumber.

As it happens, we are in store for a(n unconvincing) happy ending since along the way—not that he is all that interested in her—an attractive young nurse falls in love with Afonya. Before this conclusion arrives, however, Afonya packs up, leaves the city and visits the village where a loving aunt raised him. There, the film’s pace slows down to underscore a frustrated man’s journey into the past. The sheer beauty of the countryside—the open space, the green fields, etc.—adds poignancy to Afonya’s discovery that Aunt Frosya died two years earlier. He was sent a telegram at the time informing him of her death, but it somehow missed connecting with his heart. He now learns that Aunt Frosya had written a stack of letters to herself pretending they were from him, whom she “never tired of waiting for,” although he never came. The insertion of a fantasy-image of this aunt, alive and looking out a window in her home, pierces.

Afonya, the Soviet experiment: what lost opportunities!

A very good film, this—and Leonid Kuravlyov is wonderful as Afonya.

 

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THE CRIMINAL CODE (Howard Hawks, 1930

Based on the 1929 novel and play by future Pulitzer Prize-winner Martin Flavin,* The Criminal Code shows only too well its stage ancestry, like creases in a sheet of paper. Key words and lines of dialogue are often repeated, but in a different context that ironically alters their meaning. (One such line: “It’s what’s in his head that counts.”) Indeed, this tack is set off by the title itself, which refers to two opposing things: one, the law; two, the rules that penitentiary prisoners adhere to, such as the prohibition against “ratting out” a fellow prisoner. As state’s district attorney, Mark Brady regards the “criminal code” of the law as his bible; but when he becomes the warden of a state prison, he finds himself up against the other “criminal code”—that of the prisoners.

Two of the lead performances are over-the-top: barking yet silken-voiced Walter Huston as Brady, who is wrapped up in his “code”; slow-moving, heavy-speaking Boris Karloff as Galloway, Brady’s mirror-image, a vengeful prisoner who is wrapped up in his “code.” Brady proves the more flexible of the two when his love for his daughter, who has fallen in love with one of the prisoners, Robert Graham, trumps his code.

If these two performances are less than satisfactory, two others are magnificent. With his equally wonderful Clyde Griffiths in Josef von Sternberg’s infinitely sad An American Tragedy (1931), from Dreiser, up ahead, Phillips Holmes plays Bob Graham, a 20-year-old boy whom Brady successfully prosecutes for killing a threatening drunk with a water bottle. (Brady boasts that, if he were defending Graham, he would have been able to convince the jury to let the boy go free.) Graham’s ten-year sentence includes lung-polluting work in the prison’s jute mill; but he becomes the chauffeur of Brady and Brady’s daughter, Mary, once Brady is warden. Holmes is poignant. Even better is luminous Constance Cummings as Mary Brady. We root for these two, in part, because both actors approach their material with such truthfulness; their acting is an antidote to the hamming that Huston and especially Karloff give us.

The director is Howard Hawks, whose name for some reason appears in the credits as one of the film’s producers but not as director. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his naturalistic bent, Hawks does not exploit the potential for visual symmetry inside the prison; however, he devises excellent overhead shots of prisoners marching, en masse and in synchronized order, into the prison yard, after which they disperse into a raggedy crowd. Thus the military discipline that is demanded of them briefly—and electrifyingly—yields to the relief of a kind of release. The symmetrical machine that their marching suggests becomes a panorama of individuals. This is a visual, purely cinematic coup that Hawks was able to slip in.

See this film, then. Look past Karloff and Huston, who says “Yeah” so often—too often—that one wonders if Edward G. Robinson originated the role on Broadway.

 

* Flavin won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1944 novel Journey in the Dark.

 

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ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)

Solemn, fierce and combustible, Zero Dark Thirty, about the C.I.A.’s search to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, is one heck of a thriller. It is a simple revenge plot—bin Laden masterminded the 9/11 and other terrorist attacks—crossed with the Erin Brockovich-thing where a headstrong woman prevails over all the male jerks in the universe. In short, as is the case with many thrillers, this one’s material is exceptionally thin. There is no background whatsoever about al-Qaida’s aims and ideology, or even about bin Laden as an individual. Perhaps scenarist Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow felt that addressing such matters would slow things down. On the contrary, it is stretching their already thin material out to an incredible length that slows things down. How many times can we listen to Maya, the C.I.A. operative recruited out of high school, say over and over and over, in one way or another, “I am right, I am right, I am right”?

Just what is Maya correct about? The whereabouts of bin Laden: a fortressed compound in Pakistan a mile away from a military school. In actuality, “Maya” is a composite figure (where male jerks were part of the mix), and nothing in the film explains her certainty as to bin Laden’s hiding-place; call it “woman’s intuition” or just a stab in the dark. Unless I’m mistaken, Maya isn’t given a name until the end of the picture—a gesture towards implying that the mission matters above any individual; but this is bogus, or a case of too little too late, because Boal’s whole script is structured around Maya’s own “mission” to get bin Laden: an emphasis that unbalances the film.

Needless to say, Jessica Chastain (best actress, Golden Globe and several critics’ prizes) gives a spirited performance. Those familiar with Chastain’s appearance on Charlie Rose’s talk show know she is an unpleasant, foolish and, likely, unintelligent person; the role of Maya suits her to a tee. Especially nasty is the moment when Maya addresses her deposed station chief, whom she presumably helped get demoted, by his first name, adding condescension to treachery.

The title is military slang for the wee hours of the morning, when the Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s compound occurred. It must be said that this “dark” event is expertly handled by Bigelow and color cinematographer Greig Fraser. I kept wondering about the children in the compound, who are presumably blown up to bits.

Indeed, that is a valuable asset to the film: its capacity to make people think and ask questions: Do we really want the U.S. to target individuals, including innocents, for murder rather than bringing the criminals among them to justice? Do we want the U.S. to engage in torturing captives?

The scenes of torture in this film have drawn attention. However, I kept wondering whether Muslim men would not be visibly shamed or outraged to be stripped naked in front of Maya.

This so-so picture won a slew of prizes as best film and for director Bigelow, including from the New York critics and the National Board of Review.

NO PATH THROUGH FIRE (Gleb Panfilov, 1967)

The same year as the enormously expensive, spectacular War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1967), another war film emerged from the U.S.S.R.—this one, modest, in black and white, and twenty times better. Gleb Panfilov’s V ogne broda net is a tremendous achievement.

In 1917 civil war-torn Russia, as the Revolution approaches, young Tanya, a peasant, works as an orderly on a hospital train, dabbling in Bolshevik artwork, and eagerly awaiting what nothing can hold back. She desires death for all the “tormentors”; “The people,” she laments, “are suffering.”

Life is something that is stolen in the meantime. Tanya falls in love with a soldier; they frolic in a field she finds “beautiful.” A commissar onboard the train feels useless tending to the Red Army’s wounded; he wants to get to the front.

So much expectancy; so much anticipation.

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched scenes in other films where lovers part as the boy boards a train that will take him into combat. The one here devastates as no other. Indeed, the entire film is urgent and overwhelming. This is the rare film that really does seem to transport us back into the past. Panfilov’s camera is liberated; every shot aches with immediacy.

The closing shot is a freeze frame on Tanya’s face as her hopes for the future snap in the face of her own imminent death by a White Army officer after she sees that someone she knows has been taken prisoner. The closing shot captures Tanya’s struggle to hold onto her innocence.

This is the film that made a star of Panfilov’s wife, Inna Churikova, who plays Tanya with great resourcefulness and passion. Tarkovsky’s Anatoliy Solonitsyn is brilliant as Commissar Yevstryukov.

Winner of the top prize at Locarno.

 

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GIORNI DI GLORIA (Giuseppe De Santis, Mario Serandrei, Luchino Visconti, Marcello Pagliero, 1945)

Dense and comprehensive, Days of Glory documents, through archival materials, partisan efforts against both Fascism and the German occupation in Italy, the liberation of northern Italy, and the trials of war criminals such as Pietro Caruso, the Fascist head of the Italian police.

A film such as this is cumulative; we get a look at both the Fascist press and the underground anti-Fascist press, atrocities during the occupation, mob vengeance and highly structured justice, and partisan bravery and exploit. This is a staggering piece of work.

Even so, what with all the material, both silent and with sound, we will be particularly interested in the Caruso trial segment because Luchino Visconti, at this point a neorealist, is credited with it. Its vortex is Caruso’s face—“anxious” as the evidence is produced against him and as his fate inevitably rolls toward an appointed firing squad. We are haunted by Caruso’s unexpressed thoughts. Did Caruso, himself, come to see himself as a “traitor” and a beast, or was he rationalizing his criminal actions even to his own death?

Visconti allows for some continuous activity; but perhaps the film’s most gripping aspect is its use of consecutive snippets in other segments. Former journalist Giuseppe De Santis and Mario Serandrei are credited as the film’s “coordinating directors.”

One wonders if this piece of work influenced Roberto Rossellini’s episodic Paisà (1946). Regardless, the two works could combine for a marvelous double-bill.