Chekhovian Motifs

Some films are so implacably weird, and, yet, so indelible in impact, that the movie presents itself as an object for astounded contemplation and, of course, further study. This is my response to Kira Muratova's 2002 Ukrainian film "Chekhovian Motifs." Based on an unfinished Chekhov play and a short story, the film sutures together two narratives: on an impoverished farm, a father quarrels with his son, a student, while the rest of their large family, more or less, ignores the increasingly melodramatic contretemps; at a nearby church, a fat man is marrying a beautiful younger woman -- unfortunately, the interminable ceremony is marred by the appearance of the fat man's mistress who has committed suicide by poison the preceding night. As indicated by the title, both stories share certain motifs -- eyeglasses, bizarre non sequitur conversations, and some of the characters in the two episodes display a distinct family resemblance. A broader thematic structure links the two narratives: both involve crowds of people who simply ignore the febrile accelerating chaos around them until, suddenly, the mask slips and they go berserk. In the first plot, a tight-lipped dour wife hectors her husband unmercifully about giving money to their son, a whiny, scrawny adolescent student with a fingernails-on-chalkboard high-pitched voice. The father, who we have just seen combing his eyebrows (this is the Ukraine after all) and chanting to himself that he is "handsome, handsome, handsome", completely ignores his wife's nagging -- in fact, the ostensible subject of the nagging, the loathsome son, also ignores his mother's harangue. But, then, suddenly, the father explodes, whinnying like a horse, hurling his spectacles into the soup and, covering his head with a quilt, spinning around and around in circles shrieking -- this gesture rhymes in an eerie way with a manipulated video image of a ballerina, also pirouetting in circles as she dances to Saint-Saens. This image seems displayed as a kind of hologram in a little living room near the kitchen where the father is bellowing in rage -- the white dancer appearing against a jet-black background where a little semen-colored froth mirrors her motion is like something from one of David Lynch's early films, a startling, beautiful, and, also, frightening study in the whitest of whites contrasting with the most dense, and inky, black. Muratova structures the family quarrel around eating: we see farm animals chomping on their grain, piglets suckling on a sow, workmen swilling vodka and eating black bread, and, of course, the family all gathered together at their purgatorial dinner-table. When the shrieking gets the loudest, one of the smaller children simply falls asleep. Later, the student maniacally pumps air into the tire of his motorcycle while his fat sister fantasizes about the boy punishing their father by committing suicide by taking poison -- another motif connecting the episodes. In the next shot, worthy of Buster Keaton, we see the kid on foot -- the tire didn't hold any air -- hoofing it to the train-station, dressed in an ill-fitting (much too large) suit and ostentatiously carrying a cane -- skinny and bespectacled, he look like James Joyce out for a stroll. A gangster in a big car picks up the kid and agrees to drive him to town if the boy will show him the way to the church where the wedding is about to start. There is a musical interlude that is very beautiful and, then, we see cars converging on the country church, comically roaring into the muddy parking lot, limousines synchronized and fender to fender in an agressive chrome tete-a-tete. The wedding guests are all grotesque: various species of sexual perverts, grinning morons, old hags, and dwarfish mannequins, all of them rubbing together and prancing with disarticulated, inscrutable gestures into the church. The crowd seems to be packed with transvestites and the bride looks like the heroine from a silent movie or one of Warhol's porno films. Two handsome priests preside over the endless ceremony, chanting and singing and completely ignoring the Rabelaisian chaos that threatens to erupt among the spectators to the wedding. In the midst of the service, a woman with her face shrouded in a shawl suddenly appears, rising up from the floor, and the sybaritic congregation, who look like extravagantly depraved refugees from a von Stroheim orgy, laugh and mock her. But, later, when the plump groom recognizes the woman as his dead mistress, rumors begin to spread and no one can talk of anything but the apparition. The contrast between the solemn liturgy, the priests single-mindedly performing their ritual, loving filmed with halo-like rim-lighting, and the squalid chatter of the wedding guests is extraordinary and programmatic -- it is like the contrast between the ballerina and the squabbling family members or the clash in tone created by the beautiful choral music interlude juxtaposed with the gargoyle-like grotesques gathered for the wedding. Muratova seems to design the film to contain the most violent and improbable contrasts possible, an effect dramatized by the spectacularly high-contrast black and white camera-work. Muratova was 71 when she completed this film, and, although often censored by Soviet authorities, she's been making movies for more than 40 years. Clearly, she is a director who warrants attention and close study.