| Khrustalyov,
machinu!
Alexei Gherman Russia/France
|
|
| When Alexei Gherman was asked why it has taken him nearly four years
to complete Khrustalyov, Machinu! (Khrustalyov, My Car!) he smiled and
countered with the remark: "About as long as it has taken Stanley Kubrick
to make Eyes Wide Shut". Probe a bit deeper, and you will find that "rouble
inflation" was the primary cause for no less than five prolonged interruptions
on the most-discussed project in contemporary Russian cinema.
|
 |
| "No sooner would shooting on a few key scenes begin than
someone would come along to say the money had run out again..."
Finally, after the coffers of no less than 11 separate Russian and French backers had been squeezed dry, Alexei Gherman declared himself satisfied with the latest edited version of a project he had slowly but surely brought to creative light like a Michelangelo lying on his back at the Sistine Chapel. To comprehend the passion and perseverance that went into the making of a black-and-white film on the complex theme of the infamous, antisemitic 'Doctors' Plot' of 1952-53, a story that has fascinated Kremlinologists but may be a tough political theme to digest for the uninformed, one has to measure the career of an accomplished craftsman and skilled storyteller with a different yardstick than we use in the West. Gherman has only four films to his credit, two of which were banned and one buried deep in Soviet film vaults for 15 years! His first independently directed film, Checkpoint (1971, released 1986), prompted one of the greatest scandals in Soviet film history. A war film about the Red Army and a partisan unit fighting for their homeland against the German invaders, it's based on a true incident recorded by war correspondent Yury Gherman, Alexei's father, and features such 'antiheroics' as a deserter-collaborator who tries to make amends and thus clear his conscience, a partisan commander who refuses to blow up a bridge if it means killing Russian POWs in the process, and a Stalinist commissar who rants and raves over the weaknesses of the deserter and the commander, even though both are capable of courageous action when called upon. Checkpoint caused a furor at Goskino. At the final hearing on whether or not the film should be released or shelved, it was defended only by Konstantin Simonov, an award-winning war novelist and frontline friend of Yury Gherman. All was not lost, however, as Simonov offered Gherman a novel of his own to film: Twenty Days Without War (1976), a dreary but poignantly humane portrait of wartime suffering which was released only in the Soviet Union. It was not until Gherman, at the age of 44, received clearance to shoot My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982/85) that his career returned to high gear. Set in the early 1930s in provincial Russia, near Leningrad, and based again on the writings of his father, the narrative centers on the exploits of an idealistic police investigator intent on wiping out a band of criminals at all costs. Russian critics, noting that it took the pulse of the country by focusing on the spreading Stalinist doctrine of timely liquidation, voted My Friend Ivan Lapshin among the 10 best Soviet films of all time'. Now Khrustalyov, My Car! completes the circle. Just as Ivan Lapshin
sketched the origins of the Great Terror under Stalin in the early 1930s,
so does Khrustalyov define the dead end into which it had catapulted itself
a quarter-century later, in the mid-1950s.
|
|