Happiness (Medvedkin)

 In Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, animated characters dash around a stylized landscape of pink mesas, yellow sands, cacti, and abysmal red-walled canyons.  The landscape seems to repeat in the background as if unscrolling in a loop behind the antics of the protagonists.  Similarly, in Krazy Kat cartoons, George Herriman poses Krazy and Ignatz against an abstract backdrop of buttes and desert said to represent Coconino County (Arizona) where the comic strip is set.  Alexandr Medvedkin's 1935 comedy, Happiness  takes place in  a similarly stylized void,  -- empty steppes here and there interrupted by the onion dome of an Orthodox church half-buried in the rolling prairie.  Now and then, the characters encounter half-dry streams cutting arid canyons into the land and there are some conical hills poking up around raw-looking ruts where lanes cross the empty terrain.  In the middle of this wasteland, there is a small village, a few log shacks and mud walls that have been spiked with broken bottles and other cutting razor-sharp edges.  In this town, a man named Khymr lives with his wife, the buxom Anna.  Khymr is a dreamer and avaricious.  When he peeps through a hole in the rich man's fence, he sees the prosperous Kulak, Foka literally inhaling fat dumplings one after another without touching them -- he opens his mouth and the dumplings levitate to him.  (This feat is accomplished by reversing the film's direction.)  Foka, who is the film's villain, is a greed landlord who resists collective farming.  He's a bizarre figure with dark skin and white cotton ball sideburns and a fluffy white fringe of hair around his sunburnt bald skull -- he looks exactly like the kindly old Uncle Ben, an elderly African-American servant, once well-known for his tasty rice, but now banished from advertising into the limbo of politically incorrect product advertisements -- I suppose in his netherworld exile, he keeps company with Aunt Jemima.  Foka is so bad that at the climax of Happiness, he sets fire to the collective farm's granaries and stables, attempting to incinerate the horses trapped inside.

Khymr is a dreamer and, after his father dies trying to steal dumplings from the selfish Foka, the diminutive farmer sets forth in the world to find happiness.  He encounters a couple of monks, one of them very tall and the other almost a dwarf.  (In this Soviet film, clergy are predictably both comically ridiculous and evil.)  When a drunk peasant ventures over a rickety bridge, he drops his wallet.  The two priests, who have been exchanging hypocritical remarks about charity (virtue-signaling we would say today), see the wallet and, then, fight over it and, while distracted, Khymr picks up the money.  Back in his village he buys a mangy-looking horses, spotted like a hyena and just about as useful for farming.  In fact, when the spotted horse gets on the thatched roof of Khymr's house and starts eating up the shelter, Anna has to climb up a ladder and carry the beast down slung over her shoulders like a fireman rescuing someone from a blaze.  (There are several scenes in which the useless horse has to be carried on someone's back.  This inversion of the ordinary order suggests that the film shows us a topsy-turvy world, a world in which the Revolution has, perhaps, turned everything upside down.)  Khmyr puts the horse in a stable so tiny that the animals head and hooves protrude and, when the beast gets hungry, it just waddles around to greener pastures carrying the ramshackle shed on its back.  The horse is useless for plowing but this is, perhaps, due to the fact that Khymr's fields consist of a strange tilted spike of land, almost vertical -- it's a bizarre landform, as weird as anything that you might see in landscape of a Krazy Kat cartoon.  This tower of tilted farm acreage is too steep for the horse, but Khmyr is able to plow it with his wife in harness -- although the effort comes close to killing her.  (She passes out and has a strange dream).  "Where one man sows, seven men reap" is a proverb that the picture cites in an intertitle -- it's a silent film.  An admiral, soldier, several priests, a nun , and a tax collector all suddenly appear to expropriate Khymr's hard-earned wealth. He is stripped of all his crops and cash and, in despair, decides to kill  himself.  At this point, the movie shifts into startling hallucinatory surrealism.  An army consisting of thousands of grotesquely masked soldiers -- they look like mewling infants (and are similar to masked figures that appear in Terry Gilliam's Brazil) -- appears suddenly, together with generals, crowds of officials, and mobs of priests frenetically crossing themselves.  By this time, Khymr is building a coffin out of wood pulled down from his ruinous cabin.  Khymr is condemned for trying to end his life without State permission and sentenced to be whipped until half-dead -- that is, a whipping that lasts, according to a title, for 33 and one-third years; he is also shot on 12 fronts and condemned in other ways.  After this colossal and interminable punishment, not shown in the film, we see Khymr driving a water tank at a collective farm.  His wife Anna proudly drives a thresher and another peasant is shown operating a tractor.  Khymr's water-tank, of course, is pierced and drains water all over the landscape -he can't do anything right.  Foka is not yet dead and with a group of villainous landlord farmers (Kulaks), he tries to steal the harvest of the collective farm from its granaries mounted on stilt like legs to keep vermin, I suppose, from making off with the enterprise's wealth.  Khymr is supposed to guard the granary but he's inept at everything that he tries and, when the Kulaks appear to steal the granary, they just lift it off the ground and drag the whole building away (to the strains of Mussorgsky).  (Medvedkin likes gags involving whole structures being simply stolen -- it's easier than breaking into them.  He also likes to show enormous, bulky padlocks -- there's an obsessive concern about property and theft which seems counterintuitive in a socialist film.)  The theft of the granary is thwarted when Anna and the other peasants launch a watermelon cannonade against the thieves.  An old nun, prevented from stealing, tries to hang herself from a windmill, but the thing just whirls around and around banging her repeatedly into the ground.  She doesn't exactly die.  We see her sitting on the turf and smoking a pipe.  Foka tries to burn the granaries and stables down.  But he's thwarted and dragged off to a fate that we can imagine to be dire.  Khymr goes to town, gets fitted for a new suit, and, then, returns to the boondocks.  He leaves his half-rotten and ragged clothes on the steppe and the wicked big monk with his tiny dwarf sidekick snatch the bundle of discarded garments and fight to the death over it while Khymr and his wife observe from the shadows giggling.

Happiness is reasonably funny and has some excellent gags.  The delicate and fragile-looking hero, Khymr, is about half the size of the other characters in the picture -- he's about six inches shorter than the robust Anna.  Bemused and a bit slovenly, he looks like an unkempt hillbilly Buster Keaton.  The film has several death scenes that are supposed to be zany:  while onlookers cross themselves frantically, the dying man spins around in circles in the dust, wriggling as if afflicted by a seizure, and, then, kicks out his legs and points his stiff white beard like a lance at the sky.  It's supposed to be funny but is a bit sinister.  The sequence in which Khymr is assailed by literal armies of officials when he attempts to commit suicide is a grotesque masterpiece and, in fact, seems to have been highly influential on other filmmakers.  But the context of the movie can't be ignored.  The film was a weapon in Stalin's campaign to collectivize Russian and Ukrainian agriculture, a policy that led to the intentional famine called the Holodomor -- that is, holocaust by man-made famine.  Estimates vary but between 4 and 10 million people, mostly in the Ukraine were starved to death in order to eliminate the Kulak class and clear the path for private property to be allocated to collective farms.  Foka is a representative of the millions that were liquidated in this process. Try this thought experiment:  imagine Foka to be a Jewish money-lender and transform in your imagination the Russian Orthodox priests into rabbis -- how funny would the movie be in that context?  There's no doubt that Happiness is made with great ingenuity and skill; it's much shorter and more entertaining than Triumph of the Will but no less wicked.