CHETYRE (Ilya Khrjanovsky, 2005)

Futuristic science fiction provides artists with a veiled means for critiquing their nation as it exists, in their eyes, in the present. In cinema, a prime example is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), adapted from their own novel, The Roadside Picnic, by Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky. There, in

a grim future police state[, I have written,] at dull dawn three men venture into and across the dreaded Zone (Oz degenerated) in search of The Room, where they will be granted, they have been led to believe, their wishes. . . . Stalker translates into a symbolical journey into the past—that is, from the current Soviet state cloaked in a futuristic mask back to the original Soviet promise, which is now at best bankrupt, and perhaps was all the time a delusion or a hoax. Images turn up of an abandoned faith; one hallucinatory passage, for instance, finds Orthodox Christian symbols, amidst other discarded artifacts, stirring remotely in deep, rank, sluggish water. Tarkovsky orchestrates elements—drab, drained color, and extremely slowly moving camera, mystical lighting—to evoke powerfully the “fallen meteor” of a state where religious and other practices it has expelled nevertheless survive underground and in the collective memory, holding out hope for their eventual revival.

Tarkovsky, who made three more films, all in exile, did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he regarded as a nation-prison. He died of cancer in Paris in 1986. He was 54 years old.

Thirty-year-old Ilya Khrjanovsky’s film Chetyre (4), from the democratic—well, Putinastic—Russian Federation, suggests that post-Soviet life in Russia is at least as bleak as what is indicated in Tarkovsky’s film. An agonizingly protracted trudge through mud, in addition to shots of an industrial wasteland, imposes the irony that Khrjanovsky has Tarkovsky’s film in mind and that, for him, for his generation, little or nothing has changed—at least not for the better. From the vantage of Tarkovsky’s haunting spirit, the future is theirs; Khrjanovsky and other young Russians, though, feel they have no future, in part due to the globalized economy that has the new nation at a distinct disadvantage. (Oil has come to its rescue, however.) Written by firebrand intellectual Vladimir Sorokin, Chetyre is, like Stalker, a highly expressive film about a country whose daily consumption of vodka suggests that its motto could never be “There’s no place like home.” (Home is no place for this film; the state initially banned it but relented once its worldwide recognition kicked in. Taking their cue from President Putin, however, Russian critics excoriated it.) Chetyre won prizes for Khrjanovsky at Rotterdam, Transylvania, Buenos Aires and Seattle. This is his first film—an auspicious launch to what promises to be an important career.

The film opens stunningly, on a desolate, deserted city street in darkness. A quartet of wild dogs—the four of the title?—lie there in anything but tranquility. We hear an indeterminate machine churn and pump, correlative, perhaps, to the animals’ anxious heartbeats. Without doubt, the dogs’ homelessness is correlative to human homelessness—one problem that the Soviet Union did not have that its capitalistic replacement has generously propagated. Into the frame, as if out of nowhere, four monstrous legs—the four of the title?—descend onto the street, the whatever to which these legs belong having already sent the dogs screeching and fleeing. The entire event resonates with a paradoxical sense of sudden, omnipresent danger. After the hopefulness that glasnost and perestroika, the liberalization of Soviet totalitarianism, brought during the Soviet Union’s waning days, risk again is the order of the day. There’s no safety or security; human life, like animal life, is up for grabs.

The balance of the film is divided into two parts, the first of which takes place inside a city bar. Three customers and the bartender—the four of the title?—interact, thus defining a segment of Russian humanity. The horrific (and, for those familiar with Cold War fifties Hollywood films of the sci-fi/monster genre, slyly witty) opening has resolved itself into a scene that could happen today. It’s very late (meaning, in the wee hours), and the three strangers sit and talk and drink, while the bartender, exhausted, looks as if he wishes he could go home. The question arises for us: Does anyone in Russia now have a home, as distinct from a flop house? As the film progresses, we glean that Russia nowadays is a nation of people who have lost or, if young enough, have never had a sense of participation in, a national identity. They may have lost a cultural sense of being as well as a political one. They may have lost most everything that says to them I am.

The trio of patrons lie to one another, lest the truth reveals how emblematic each one is of the social, moral and economic nosedive that the Soviet Union has taken in becoming the former Soviet Union. As in all capitalistic societies, some citizens now are way more successful than others, but such success has come at the expense of fellow citizens, which is to say, themselves, to the extent that part of the national identity, the sense of everyone’s belonging to a common destiny, has been sacrificed. Being able to afford to patronize this bar, the three persons here are moderately successful, which might mean that they possess feelings of guilt for having succeeded at the expense of others, on the one hand, and yet worry that they will lose their success, on the other—that monstrous legs will descend out of nowhere at any moment to stomp them out. Their lies to one another are an attempt to secure their advantageous position while hiding their vulnerability. One, a seller of “dead meat,” with the aura of the old Soviet KGB that this implies, tells his newfound drinking compatriots that he sells water to the national leaders in the Kremlin, the implication being that the essentials of life, such as water, have been transformed by Russia’s new capitalism into a saleable commodity. Here also is a hint of the self-indulgence that capitalism turns into currency, for the “water” that this seller sells is, likely, “designer water.” In actuality a piano tuner, the other male of the three late-night drinkers is a technician or a scientist who claims to know about Soviet cloning experiments dating back to Stalin’s time in the 1930s. His disclosure turns Russian reality into instant science fiction because, according to him, there are countless clones among the current Russian population as a result of the Soviet prowess at genetic engineering, which entailed making four doubles—the four of the title?—for each experimental subject. Whole villages are populated with these clones—a totalitarian nightmare; other places take care of the infirm ones—a socialist dream. (It is implied, therefore, that this piano tuner augments his income by blackmailing authorities in exchange for his keeping mum about the cloning project.) Finally, the sole female in the group is—it seems pretty clear to us—a prostitute; but her claim may be the most exhorbitant. She says she sells seashells by the seashore—or, to be more accurate, she sells a Japanese machine, she ridiculously claims, that increases worker productivity: a glorious allusion to Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Khrjanovsky thus links current (2005) globalization to corporate greed, reminding us that capitalism, in whatever form, sacrifices the well-being and human rights of workers in its pursuit of profits. That a prostitute is boasting this activity as an item on her résumé is hilarious—and poignant. By implying that what this woman sells, that is to say, sex, is necessary to enhance worker productivity implies that the former Soviet Union is without a dream—a sociopoliticophilosophical dream—to get its engines of labor going. Moreover, this further implies a homebound depression, to wit, there isn’t enough sex to be normally had within the limits of Russia or the Russian Federation. In context, this reflects on three things: the level of Russian vodka consumption—a definite deterrent to sex; the limits that capitalism places on economic ascension; and the dissatisfaction felt by those who have advanced, who can afford to buy sex, more vodka, and entry into a fancy late-night bar—a society, that is, that offers designer water (while much of the world suffers nondesigner thirst). Circling this woman is our recollection that the Soviet Union tried to eliminate prostitution and only failed to be perfect in this endeavor because human nature is human nature—which may also be why the Soviet Union failed. (Prostitution was relegated to invisibility in the Soviet Union; in the current Russia, because of deepened and more widespread poverty, it abounds.) Everything fits—satirically.

The exaggerations, dodges and lies that flash among the three “new” Russians accumulate into an index of Russian Federation distress, dissatisfaction, disconsolation. But Sorokin and Khrjanovsky are aiming for a more sympathetic theme. The “winners” in the new capitalistic Russian jackpot are actually losers to two extents: one, their “winning” is wholly reliant on other Russians’ being “losers”; two, because they are cut off from the Russian population in general, they themselves feel incomplete, dissatisfied, and are themselves losers. The second part of Chetyre helps make Khrjanovsky’s criticism generational. At the same time, the structural fissure achieved by the film’s two disparate parts underscores the division in the Russian population that the film addresses. This division is economic and generational. In line with the latter, it also refers to what some people remember and what some others are too young to know. Never having really experienced the Soviet Union firsthand, someone Khrjanovsky’s age cannot recall either the dream or the reality, the good or the bad. Chetyre may be Khrjanovsky’s attempt to remedy this by imaginatively reconciling divisions, although the film also suggests the ever deepening of these divisions.

The second part of the film, which is exceedingly strange, focuses on the prostitute. The two males will reappear in updating passages, in one of which one of them is shown having been impressed into dangerous military service for some unspecified crime against the state. The film more or less drops the two men, then, but even this is expressive of the disposable nature of human beings in the “new” Russia—a clone of precisely how they were in Stalin’s Russia. We follow the young woman to her remote home village, where the crazy fantasy of cloning is translated into reality. She herself is one of the clones! In context, it is hard not to associate, possibly even identify, these clones with Russia’s Stalinist past, especially since its premium on power and the long shadow of this past help determine the warped nature of the current Russian government. This distortion comes from within. However, local and global capitalism both exert additional warping forces from without. The village embodies both the extinction of individuality that totalitarianism imposes and anxiety over the loss of whatever sense of individuality the inhabitants retain as they hide away from the new era of assaults on individualism. In a sense, in Russia today, in one way or another, everyone is being impressed into dangerous service to the state for some unspecified crime. Mark Lipovetsky, a scholar in Russian literature, makes the astute point that the character who is impressed into the military thus himself becomes, in a way, a clone. We may infer from this that the entire population of Russia consists of individuals in danger of becoming, in some sense, clones. Their “crime” may be nothing more (or less) than their existence. Sorokin and Khrjanovsky have created a twisted, darkly sparkling, Kafkaesque parable.

On one level, the village, most of whose inhabitants are old crones, provides a grotesque parody of marketplace self-sufficiency. The village produces folk dolls out of whatever results from old crones there chewing bread—a gross communal activity. We get to witness the process—hags at work, negotiating its unpleasantness with drunkenness. When they undress and pinch one another’s withered breasts, one is reminded of the naked old witches in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971). The passage splendidly expresses the insularity, the inwardness, of this rural community—as well as something else that is closely related: the degree to which these women rely on one another for what sense of identity they possess. In effect, they exist in their own little Russia, while the prostitute, in order to earn her living, must go back and forth between two Russias, two worlds. As a result, she is without a sense of who she is. Regardless, she also is fueled by alcohol, as our introduction to her in the city bar reminds us. Alcohol in this film may symbolize survival. All these women do whatever they must in order to survive.

The young woman goes on another journey, even farther out, to attend the funeral of a sister-clone. One of the things we must do in order to survive is maintain contact with others, and in this case the character must submit to the ordeal of trekking through the wilderness simply to see her sister one last time. For me, there is something heartbreaking about the way in which this is presented here: the one who is traveling to renew the contact isn’t human, nor is the one with whom she is renewing the contact, who, additionally, is deceased. These removes from humanity and from human life make all the more poignant the living clone’s desire to stake some sort of a claim in humanity.

Chetyre is sometimes not an easy film to watch, and it is even more difficult to understand. But it isn’t a stupid trick film that brandishes the filmmaker’s contempt for us by manipulating and playing games with us, like The Sixth Sense or Memento. Rather, it is genuinely mysterious, perhaps even, in sum, unfathomable—an irreducible diamond of the dark. And it fascinates! Sorokin and Khrjanovsky, it seems to me, are attempting to express how it feels to be a Russian today, wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other (perhaps) powerless to be born. (I feel Matthew Arnold’s ghost stirring!) The best way to navigate this marvelous movie may be to brush off your Keatsian negative capability, and feel with your intellect and think through things with your feelings. How does it feel to be a Russian today? Consider this: the most wildly popular recent Russian film is Nochnoy dozor (2004), which has spawned a sequel, Dnevnoy dozor (2006), and with yet a third installment in the planning stages. These are vampire movies—movies about “the undead.” (And not just movies about vampires, but about warring gangs of vampires!) Timur Bekmambetov’s series of gory fantasies may be the simplified version of the more complex and intriguing thing that Sorokin and Khrjanovsky have wrought. Chetyre is brilliantly written and beautifully made—a work of art, a kind of dream.

METAMORPHOSIS (Valerij Fokin, 2002)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from disquieting dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
     Written in German, Czech author Franz Kafka’s satirical 1912 The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) weighs the sense of isolation and alienation that has overtaken a travelling salesman. Gregor’s “disquieting dreams” reflect his waking life, which, except that Kafka’s was at a desk, mirror Kafka’s humdrum clerical work. By his dreams Gregor imagines his own death.
     Valerij Fokin’s Prevrashcheniye is mesmerizing—and painfully hilarious. Now a period piece, it’s part of our dream of the modern past. During opening credits a sepia photograph of a corner of Gregor’s bed appears, joined by the trace sound of lapping water, suggesting the unconscious. The film proper begins, surely, as a black-and-white dream (except for a disquieting patch of pink), where the sound has materialized as falling rain. The camera glides to reveal a train silently pulling in at the Prague station. (The muffled measured drumbeat could be the dreamer’s heartbeat.) Passengers exit. “Mother, father, it’s Gregor!” we hear, as the camera withdraws from a solemnly dressed man standing on the platform; Gregor imagines the greeting, for he walks alone a long way home, shielding himself from the rain with his suitcase. More and more color slips into view; by rote, Gregor leans in at the dinner table so that Mother can dab clean a corner of his mouth. That night, Gregor dreams of yet another train departure; the conductor is his indifferent father, drawing from Gregor a quizzical look.
     Next morning, Gregor cannot get off his back and out of bed—until he falls onto the floor, anxiously flexing hands and feet. Yevgeni Mironov’s performance is phenomenal. Through body movements, contortions and noises, he expresses how Gregor feels—what Gregor has turned into.

DEVIL IN THE FLESH (Marco Bellocchio, 1986)

Marco Bellocchio’s Devil in the Flesh, the one with the blowjob, befits the maker, at 25, of Fists in the Pocket (1965), the most perverse (and stunning) debut in Italian cinema. By comparison with the one in this powerful film, no family since, in either real or reel life, has seemed quite so dysfunctional. In between, Bellocchio mustered brilliant surrealism for a savage attack on Italian patriarchy, in In the Name of the Father (1971), and has, since, raised another firestorm at home, with the intriguing The Conviction (1991), which tries to locate the elusive line where “rape” starts being rape. Here is a marvelous filmmaker finally, unfairly, outdone by an American president. No longer can Bellocchio lay claim to the world’s most celebrated blowjob.

Devil in the Flesh derives from Raymond Radiguet’s novel Le diable au corps, written, in 1921, while in his teens—Radiguet died at twenty of typhoid—and first filmed, famously, by Claude Autant-Lara in 1946. Then, the story was of a love affair between a sixteen-year-old boy and the wife of a soldier at war—in France, scandalous mostly because of the treasonous nature of the sex; the film, shimmeringly poetic, made an international star of Gérard Philipe, who, both handsome and immensely gifted, brought to the screen, really for the first time, a fully dimensioned male adolescent. Men identified; women swooned. It was left to James Dean, in Hollywood, to swamp “the teenager” in self-pity, in Nicholas Ray’s cornball Rebel Without a Cause (1955); but a more mature perspective allowed viewers to recognize here, not an adolescent as he really was, but one the way he wanted to be seen. Dean’s acting is impossible to take seriously anymore; Philipe’s still shines.

Bellocchio’s bewitching film, in updating and relocating the story, has also had to modify it. The script of Diavolo en corpo—by Bellocchio, Enrico Palandri and Ennio De Concini—changes the setting from Great War France to present-day Italy. The woman, Giulia, is now engaged, not married. Her intended, Giacomo, isn’t, literally at least, a soldier; he is a terrorist who, once he is caught, renounces his radicalism and fingers accomplices in the hope of living a free, “normal” life. At Giacomo’s trial, Giulia befriends Andreà, an eighteen-year-old schoolboy who has followed her there. Giulia, shaky to begin with, realizes that a relationship with Andreà might divest her of her sanity. Her attempts to warn him away, though, fail. They become lovers.

The opening passage mesmerizes. Onto a rooftop in the square connecting an apartment building and Andreà’s school a distraught girl ventures. A hot breeze turns her hair into oceanic drifts; her enormous eyes disclose, not just distress, but a life of distress. While the pupils watch silently, a priest appeals to the child not to usurp God’s authority by committing suicide. The child speaks in some other language than Italian; she may not even understand the priest. In any case, the priest is not the one to save her. Rather, the child is rescued by a neighbor whose eyes are a sorrowful match for hers. This is Giulia. Why wouldn’t Andreà fall in love? Bellocchio’s patient, placid gaze alternates between Giulia and her young counterpart, the foreign girl, recording the mysterious communion developing between them, while also interjecting glimpses of Andreà’s appreciation of the revelatory and redemptive act that he is witnessing. For the young woman, the child’s pain holds up a mirror; for the girl, Giulia’s compassionate eyes silently respond to her direct appeal, no matter the language barrier, composing an epiphany. Snapped out of her trance, pleading for help, the girl is now safely rescued. Into Andreà’s adolescently tormented world the possibility of tenderness has been introduced. He is seduced by it.

But from beneath her carefree, beautiful exterior—Maruschka Detmers, from Jean-Luc Godard’s First Name: Carmen (1984), plays the part—Giulia’s own distress has been revealed. Its cause is easy to interpolate. Giulia’s relationship with Giacomo has been conflicted from the start. He is a terrorist; her father was the victim of terrorists—an interior conflict Bellocchio underscores when, on her way to Giacomo’s trial, Giulia stops by her father’s memorial with fresh flowers. And now Giacomo has recanted and “repented,” thus inadvertently mocking his fiancée’s painful reconciliation to his cause, and thereby exacerbating her sense of guilt over betraying her father’s memory. Moreover, Giulia has more to feel guilty about: Giacomo’s political betrayals in pursuit of an ordinary bourgeois life with her. Indeed, Bellocchio provides visual evidence of her troubled soul. In bed with Andreà, watching on television Giacomo rationalize his capitulation, by remote control Giulia tries erasing the image, blankly flipping channels but somehow always returning to the image and words she is fleeing—a correlative to the sense of imprisonment she herself feels, along with her sense of personality decomposition due to self-disgust over Giacomo’s “deal” with authorities. It is to flee all this corrosive guilt, then, that, touched by his innocence, Giulia has sought refuge with Andreà. Their lovemaking, in the very bed intended for her and Giacomo, defies the expedience that Giacomo has intruded into the foundation of their planned life together.

In her relationship with Andreà, Giulia seeks to reconfirm her humanity, that is, her honesty, decency, compassion. But Andreà brings to the relationship a different need; in effect protesting his father, he seeks to confirm his identity—his manhood, if you will. At times this disparity of needs puts the couple emotionally out of sync. Having climbed from street to Giulia’s bedroom terrace by rope, the boy perspires; Giulia wipes him dry and, in bed, covers him with a sheet, which he flings off. As they begin making love, Giulia again places the sheet over him, to keep him from catching cold—a maternal impulse that also shows that Giulia brings to their lovemaking the full range of her personality. Andreà, hilariously, flings off the sheet twice again, leaving both his childish pride and fragile schoolboy’s ego as naked as his back. How to recover? Now assuming force of dominance, he presses down on Giulia’s hands, intent on keeping them away from that humiliating sheet, and pinning her beneath him until she submits to the rhythm of his lead. She wants to make love; he wants to make a point.

Seamlessly interweaving fantasy and reality, Bellocchio had already taken his Leap Into the Void (1980), achieving, at forty, a grace similar to Luis Buñuel’s in his French mode (Belle de Jour, 1967, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1971, The Phantom of Liberty, 1974). Since then he has further refined his surrealism to gain the effect of suddenly appearing and disappearing ripples in a naturalistic pond. In Diavolo, surrealism is mostly insinuated, almost invisible (although, in one instance, Andreà’s father, a psychoanalyst whose sometime patient Giulia is, steamily imagines her rising naked from his therapeutic couch). In one witty scene, for instance, Giulia and Andreà return to her apartment to find that her prospective mother-in-law, aware of Giulia’s affair, has booby-trapped the place with string she has tautly drawn across doorways and hallways, to “rope” Giulia in with her guilt! This extraordinary method, of rendering surrealism nearly invisible by making its agency the commission of a symbolic act by one of the characters themselves, Bellocchio employs like an accomplished virtuoso. Another example: Giulia’s trampling in dance a floor covered with silverware. She is striking with her feet the bourgeois future with Giacomo that she dreads!

The film’s final scene is every bit as remarkable as its first. Seated, Andreà faces questioners during the oral phase of his senior exam. Unbeknownst to him, Giulia slips into the audience behind him. One teacher chides Andreà for discussing Dante—a national cultural “father”—in a passionless monotone. (We are not surprised; this boy, after all, slept soundly while Giulia snipped away at his pubic hair with scissors.) With charm and good humor, Andreà proceeds to deny that he is a Marxist, a pacifist, a this-“ist,” a that-“ist.” It is good to resist being categorized or reduced; but does anything substantial exist in Andreà that could be reduced? We get our answer. Andreà explains, coolly, that he wants only the involvement with Dante necessary to pass the exam. Now reading, translating and interpreting a passage from Antigone, he opines that the conflict between Antigone and Creon demonstrates opposite responsibilities—to individual conscience and to higher authority—that in fact should be held in balance. My God! In a flash everything about Andreà comes together—for us, for Giulia, perhaps for himself. Just as this exam, for him, is a rite of passage, so is his affair with Giulia, who, listening to his test response, finally understands this. But more: underscoring the cruel pain of this revelation is their separateness; she remains facing his back. Wittily though ruefully, the camera keeps both in view, one behind the other, Andreà as unaware of Giulia’s presence as, Bellocchio implies, he is unaware of her existence. Utterly sacrificed to the satisfaction of an adolescent boy’s voracious ego, Giulia—now at last as completely bereft as the girl on the rooftop at the beginning of the film—silently disintegrates into tears. Heartrending.

There is a diavolo in Bellocchio, and this fascinating film, to which there is so much more than what gave it such wide publicity, is very nearly perfect. (I confess; I refrained here from discussing the notorious scene as a protest against this publicity. However, I cracked up when mentioning the “oral” phase of Andreà’s exam.) One of the chief contributors to this near perfection is Giuseppe Lanci’s subtle, intense cinematography, which fully justifies cinema’s color experiment—something very few films have done. (But another is Andrei Tarkovsky’s phenomenal 1982 Nostalghia, also lensed by Lanci.) While all the acting is apt, three performances shine: Detmers as Giulia, Federico Pitzalis as Andreà, and Anita Laurenzi as Giacomo’s devoted mother—someone’s future mother-in-law from hell. Indeed, Laurenzi is nothing short of brilliant.

MONDAY MORNING (Otar Iosseliani, 2002)

Jacques Tati’s comedies, including the beauties Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Playtime (1967), derive much of their delicate though combustible humor from the little bits of mayhem that Monsieur Hulot causes unawares, this obliviousness of his a defense against a capricious and, increasingly, mechanized and dehumanizing universe. (Personally, I find Tati’s Oscar-winning My Uncle (1958)—Mon Oncle, Monsieur Hulot—the least of his accomplishments.) Otar Iosseliani’s hommage to Tati, Lundi matin—Monday Morning—takes a different tack. Vincent, M Hulot’s Everyman-descendant, is quite sensitive to everything happening around him; he has few, if any, defenses to counter a modern world of monotonous routine and iron-clad restriction that bars him from smoking at almost every turn. In the gentle division (Godard’s 1967 Weekend belongs to the savage division), Monday Morning is the finest French comedy since Tati’s intricately choreographed masterpiece, Playtime, and Iosseliani fully deserves the Silver Bear he won at Berlin for directing it. It’s unlikely that the 21st century will produce a richer, more humane, funnier satirical comedy.

Vincent’s collar isn’t as white as Monsieur Hulot’s. A welder at a local chemical plant, Vincent endures voluminous industrial smoke daily, as do his co-workers, rendering sorely ironic the fact that they all have to snuff their cigarettes at the factory gate. Safety first. Everyone takes every last puff he can before dispensing with pleasure for the day’s grinding labor; it’s part of the routine. Vincent is indeed a creature of routine. Slippers await him on the outdoor steps of his place for his morning walk to his blue car parked in the driveway; they are left outside the car door and exchanged inside the car for work shoes. When he comes home at day’s end, the process is reversed, leaving the slippers once again on the steps. We pick up on this process twice—four rounds of identical activity, where two of the occurrences mirror-image another two.

At home, after the home repairs his wife prevails upon him to attend to, Vincent intently paints a landscape, a tiny dot of which represents the solitary person there, presumably an anonymous and indistinct projection of himself. We can’t help noticing that Vincent isn’t a very good painter. Is he a frustrated soul whose restricted experience has denied him an opportunity to grow as an artist, or when he paints is he simply unwinding, relaxing? Vincent can also smoke at home. (His wife, a nonsmoker to begin with, wouldn’t think of bringing the factory home by denying him this minimal bit of freedom and pleasure.)

The couple have two children. One is a small schoolboy, who in the contemporary western fashion is monstrously rude and unkind to his father, rebuffing the man’s keen interest in his son’s attempt to repair a mangled bicycle wheel. Vincent accepts this ill treatment as part of his lot; the boy in effect wears a “No Papa-ing” sign in lieu of the factory’s “No Smoking” sign. Vincent’s tall, teenaged son is another matter. While as protective of his privacy as his younger brother, he is warm, courteous, at times even deferential to the father he just a bit—we can detect this if we squint—idolizes. (This boy is also an artist.) This is absolutely brilliant of Iosseliani, who wrote the film as well as directed it; the relaxing of disciplinary rigor in raising children has indeed de-Oedipalized family dynamics, making possible the advance (rather than decline) in filial respect from childhood to adolescence. But there is something else, of an older order, anchoring the teenager’s burgeoning humanity: His elderly grandmother, his father’s mother, lives right downstairs. She is also working her magic on the younger boy, reading him bedtime stories; and the care and concern with which the older boy interacts with her is pure tonic. Both brothers thus far live outside the monotonous routines that define both their parents’ lives. Twice we watch the older boy and his girlfriend up in the heavens, triumphant over the world below, flying on a handmade glider. This freedom is what, responsible, Vincent no longer has. Iosseliani’s film is about his taking back from life a little bit of the freedom it has taken from him.

One day Vincent doesn’t pass through the gate into the chemical factory. He pauses long enough to turn around and spend the day instead on a grassy hill in deep contemplation of things. He decides to leave wife, kids, home and job for a vacation. He is a small and quiet man in need of an adventure. Others may negotiate their mid-life crises by having extramarital affairs; he will simply take off for a bit. Estranged from his mother, his gravely ill father—their scene together is deliciously funny and intimate—provides the means: the elder’s life’s savings. Venice, Cairo, Constantinople: the itinerary is set. Without a word to wife, mother and sons, Vincent takes off—but not before encountering an old friend, with rats for (much loved) pets, who, a man, masquerades for his job in a bar as a woman—this, an ironic aside reminding us of the tightness of the market that renders even a job as unpleasant as Vincent’s a boon and a blessing.

Up until this point the film has paid almost equal attention to the boys, especially the older one, as to their father. In particular, we have watched son pay silent tribute to his father as he paints in the local church Saint George slaying a dragon—a painting based on a sketch that his father probably made when he was the boy’s age. (The boy’s younger brother thus unwittingly pays homage to their father by indirection when he recruits a local alligator for a “real-life” enactment of the legendary event.) But now the film will mostly follow the boys’ father on his “journey.” The film is indeed Homeric in a number of ways, not the least of which is its attention to Vincent’s odyssey away from home and back. (But Vincent’s of course is the much shorter!) Too, the film, in epic fashion, begins in the middle of things—in the middle of middle-aged Vincent’s loop of routines. Finally, the film, like Homer’s epic poems, is full of repetition—of happenstances, though, rather than of phrases and images. For example, in Venice the elegant, beautiful woman whom Vincent sat opposite on the train glides regally across the canal. A funny example: The pickpocket who relieves Vincent of his money upon his arrival tries another day to rob him again, whereupon Vincent, this time detecting the quick hand, pulls out his pants pockets, saying, “Not this time.” Vincent gets drunks twice, once in France, once in Italy—and so forth and so on. His routines both at home and at work are also repetitive in the extreme.

In Venice, where he takes his holiday, Vincent escapes his routines, but, ironically, this excursion of his crosses the circle of other people’s routines: a Venetian friend; his father’s old comrade, a retired concert pianist played very humorously by Iosseliani himself; the pickpocket. Venice is a problematic place for Vincent’s adventure, and viewers perhaps should know in advance that, unlike other films, this one imbues the city with no startling beauty or special charm. (The color cinematographer is William Lubtchansky, and he and Iosseliani conspire to give the film a consistently ordinary and appealingly natural look. There isn’t a pretty image throughout.) “Why Venice?” an interviewer has asked the director. Iosseliani’s reply: “To avoid reaching the Pyramids. Because Byzantium no longer exists. There is so little left of our past: Mussolini bombed the Parthenon, Istanbul has become Turkish. Venice still looks like a chocolate box, but it was once the territory of the Doges and the Bridge of Sighs—a bloodthirsty and very violent place where Marco Polo was imprisoned so he couldn’t reveal the secret formulas of spaghetti and gun powder. All that is left is tourism. . . . You have to climb onto the roofs of Venice to see the this city’s spirit.” Indeed, Vincent’s Venetian friend, acting here as Iosseliani’s surrogate, literally takes him onto a roof to show him the mysterious and provocative past: the Venice the tourists cannot see.

The pickpocketed Vincent gets no farther than Venice, although he creates the illusion of wider travels by sending various postcards home, all of which his wife, miffed, rips up without reading. (Her mother-in-law must break into her backyard-buried pot to get at her savings in order that the family may continue during her son’s absence from work.) This is among numerous implicit points in the film that contributes to its elliptical and elusive quality—a wondrous metaphor for the thread of his life that Vincent feels has slipped out of his grasp. How, for instance, do we know that Vincent doesn’t make it to Egypt despite his postcard home picturing the pyramids? Well, we know he has no money, and while we can interpolate his borrowing enough to get home, we can hardly imagine his borrowing enough to continue on an eastward journey. Also, he later mentions to his wife that he has seen his father twice. We ourselves have witnessed the first of these visits, when his father has Vincent open the safe and take out the money inside it. The second visit must have occurred immediately after Vincent’s return, when instead of proceeding with his adventure he, it’s reasonable to assume, would have had to explain to his father why there is no money whatsoever left for him to return. Throughout, the film is like that; so much isn’t spelled out. The overriding fact here, of course, is that Vincent has had his brief adventure, that indeed the pickpocketing incident was a part of that adventure that broke the uncharmed circle of his monotonous routine.

Upon his return home, despite a remark or two from mother and spouse, Vincent is greeted with the continuation of family routines. He isn’t castigated; he is permitted to slip right back in. The next morning, something happens that constitutes one of the most moving events in all of cinema. Before Vincent is about to scoot off to work, his wife kisses him for the first time in the film.

Back at work, Vincent cannot see what we see, but doubtless he can feel its effect: a stunning long shot of the fume-belching factory.

Monday Morning provides a brilliant example of one of the most critically important aspect of a filmmaker’s art: his use of the camera. Iosseliani’s moving, roving camera is exactly correlative to the riches of life—and humanity’s appetite for these—with which this life-affirming masterpiece abounds. It’s rare to see such a lovingly rendered film where the mise-en-scène seems so unmannered, “uncomposed”; what we see appears effortlessly lighted upon, adding to the sense of the film’s airy naturalism, which combines beautifully with all the odd touches, like the alligator that pops up, or the contingent of cossacks, seemingly out of time, singing in Russian at a table in the French bar. Both the camera and the mise-en-scène especially delight us, besides, because this is a genuine film, not a stage play or a television program. It is, in fact, virtually a silent film with sound effects. The dialogue is sparse, and so the visual aspect, disclosing Vincent’s life and his adventure and, as in a Yasujiro Ozu film, the humanity of all the relationships takes precedence over all else. We keep watching and watching and, in tune with Vincent, our surrogate, have a quiet, wonderful adventure of our own. The film assuages our loneliness a little, and this, too, helps bring us to a film that is, after all, about the lonely lives people lead even within a family and a community. You won’t find here a blunt assault on modern alienation. Iosseliani is sensitive to the low-keyed hum of contemporary alienation.

I regret to say I have thus far seen no other film by Iosseliani, either during his Soviet period (after short films, his first feature was banned, after which he went to sea and later worked in a foundry) or his French period,* although a few of the latter works have taken significant festival prizes. Monday Morning makes me want to see everything he has done. I agree with Andrei Tarkovsky that Iosseliani is one of the greatest film artists, a judgment the late Russian master arrived at without ever having seen Monday Morning.

To every single man, woman, boy and girl, Iosseliani’s cast is perfect, priceless. Particularly wonderful are Anne Kravz-Tarnavsky as Vincent’s wife, Narda Blanchet as Vincent’s mother, Dato Tarielashvili-Iosseliani (son? stepson?) as Vincent’s older son, Nicolas, and, above all, Jacques Bidou as Vincent. Who is this Jacques Bidou, who, fiftyish, never acted in a film before but gives a performance of such effortless humanity? He is the producer or executive producer of numerous French-African films, including one of the most brilliant films of the 1990s, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot (1996), from Zimbabwe and Cameroon, and South African-born Raoul Peck’s Lumumba (2001), about the (Belgian) Congo leader, Patrice Lumumba. How rare the opportunity to put a face on a film producer! How did Iosseliani come up with such a choice for the lead role? He explains: “I admire Jacques Bidou for the work that he has produced and his uncompromising stance. Most of all, though, I admire him as a person.”

Miraculously, Iosseliani’s choice panned out. What luck. What humanity.

* This is no longer the case. This site includes at least three other entries on Iosseliani films.