Cinephiles keep lists of films that evade them, movies that are obscure but heralded as "masterpieces" by the fortunate few who have watched them. I first encountered references to the cinema of Kira Muratova in a review written by Jonathan Rosenbaum, a critic who published his work primarily in the Chicago Reader. In a 1996 review, Rosenbaum said that Kira Muratova's The Asthenic Syndrome was, perhaps, the greatest film ever made in Russia. His description of the picture was delirious, insanely enthusiastic, and, of course, inspired me to search for the film. However, Muratova's movies are almost never shown in the West and the director remains unknown even to most film critics. At last, I have found a Russian DVD of The Asthenic Syndrome subtitled in English, albeit poorly, and have watched the two-and-a-half hour film. (I have seen several of Kuratova's movies made after the 1989 Asthenic Syndrome -- Chekhovian Motifs and The Tuner. Those pictures were challenging and, at least Chekhovian Motifs, completely unlike anything I had ever seen. I'm not sure that I understood them at all.) There is always a level of disappointment in bagging a "white whale" of this sort. Of course, the movie is different from what I imagined and, as advertised by Rosenbaum's essay, extremely rebarbative and perverse. As with Muratova's other pictures that I have seen, I will not pretend to fully understand the film and, in composing this note, have had to rely upon a number of sources describing Muratova's career and The Asthenic Syndrome. This task is complicated by the fact that the Russian DVD available to me is somewhat murky, at least in parts, and is equipped with subtitles that are written in pidgen-English, often without verb tenses that make any sense and lacking both definite and indefinite articles.
The Asthenic Syndrome is divided into two parts. The first section is shot on handsome sepia-tinted black and white film stock. This part of the movie details a middle-aged woman's response to the death of her husband. The second, and much longer, section of the picture, made in color, shows that adventures of a narcoleptic school teacher named Nikolai -- this part of the film chronicles Nikolai's wanderings in Odessa, the city where Muratova lived and worked (for Odessa Studios and Goskino). There is an aspect of the second part of the movie that seems Joycean -- Nikolai walks around town like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses encountering various types of people and seeing all sorts of strange and absurd things. The two parts of the movie are sutured together by an interlude, about forty minutes into the feature, in which it is revealed that part one (the mourning woman) is, actually, a film within a film. We see that the sepia-toned picture is being shown in a large theater. After the movie, the audience scrambles for the door, obviously angry with the film that they have seen. One man grumbles to his wife that he is tired and, after work, would like to see something enjoyable, perhaps, with songs and dance. This being a Muratova picture, the audience fleeing the theater can't get out the door (or even to the aisles) without a brawl -- people are fighting over someone's excessively large hat. The emcee for this premiere of the movie has brought the actress who plays the protagonist on-stage and they invite questions. But no one is interested in posing any questions -- the crowd just wants to get away from the theater. Everyone departs, leaving the theater empty except for a sinister block of soldiers or police in black uniforms (at least forty of them) who get up and leave en masse. In the middle of the auditorium, we see a man sleeping -- this is Nikolai, the somnambulant protagonist of the film's second half. (I assume that the cops or soldiers, who march out under orders from their commander, represent in some way, the official censors -- The Asthenic Syndrome has the dubious distinction of being the only film banned in Russia during the relatively liberal glasnost period just preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union.) The emcee and actress leave as well, the leading lady dropping her red flower on the stage. This transition establishes the fact that ordinary film audiences, including those comprised of cinema enthusiasts, simply can't tolerate Muratova's work -- at least, as it is shown in the first forty-minute part of the film. What follows will be even worse.
The Asthenic Syndrome begins with a shot of a battered doll on a trash heap. Bubbles float down on the doll. A boy overhead in a window above the midden is blowing bubbles. Suddenly, the film cuts to three old women who proclaim their love for Tolstoy and how reading that author improves one's humanity. Then, we see a deep crater at a construction site. Two men are in the pit, torturing a cat by tying a can to its tail. On the edge of the crater, an architect and engineer (with blue prints under his arm) look on approvingly. The film, then, shows us a huge cemetery where several funerals seem to be underway in a labyrinth of graves so tightly pressed together that there is really no place to walk or stand. A man who looks like Stalin is being buried. His casket is open and people are jammed in between the graves next to the coffin. A blonde woman lets out a horrible, bestial cry. She walks off before the funeral is done, zigzagging among the graves. The woman seems demented and enraged -- she hits at everyone she encounters. When a train arrives, she has to violently fight her way onto the car against a stream of passengers. At a desolate bus stop, the woman asks a man if he wants to sleep with her. Then, she starts sobbing and tries to hit him. They wrestle for awhile. The widow walks around town slugging and smashing into people. We see her in her apartment slugging down vodka from a mason jar and chomping on black bread. On the street again, the widow picks up a homeless drunk, brings him to her apartment and makes him strip -- he's so drunk, he has a great deal of difficulty getting out of his clothes. We see them in bed together, but the widow is agitated and starts crying. She dismisses the drunk and begins hurling her clothing on the floor and smashing wine glasses by dropping them off the edge of the table. It turns out that the woman is a doctor. She goes to the hospital where she works, a nasty place with long corridors and squalid toilets. She submits her resignation to the dismay of her dignified older boss (we have seen him wearing a beret and with his hair disheveled at grave side.) Riding down to ground level in an elevator, she keeps lifting the sheet over a corpse go peek at the dead face much to the dismay of the nurse with her. Back at home, the widow cleans up the mess of spilled wine and broken glasses. She looks out the window and sees a hoist poised against the sky. Somehow, she is atop the hoist (there's no cut to explain this) and it descends to earth, signifying, it seems, the deflation of her rage. Some workers are moving heavy furniture out of a nearby apartment -- the architecture is all spalling and cracked Brutalist concrete. The widow is shoved up against a wall and gets dirt on her coat. A kind woman stops her and says that her back is dirty. The woman tries to brush off her back. Once she has done, the scene shifts to the dark auditorium where the film is being shown and, then, the picture moves into the transitional scenes introducing Nikolai.
The next hour and fifty minutes of the film is extremely complex, confusing, and difficult to follow. Leaving the theater, Nikolai gets onto a subway train in which everyone seems to be sleeping. He also falls asleep stepping off the train and falls to the ground, splayed out like a corpse. People come and go, stepping over him. We see a fat blonde woman, apparently, the vice-principal of a school that is crammed with Marxist-Leninist busts and other knickknacks. This turns out to be the place where Nikolai works, apparently as an English schoolteacher. The students either flirt with Nikolai or ignore him. When he tries to discipline one unruly kid, the student beats him up. The vice-principal seems to despise Nikolai and harangues him for being late to work. On the soundtrack, we hear a jaunty English pub-song, something about "Chiquita." Outside a big queue of people are waiting for fish at an open-air market. Shoving leads to an overall brawl. The fish kee getting dropped in the dirt, something that upsets the angry female customers. The shop girl tells them to just wash off the fish at home, but people respond that they don't have running water. (In one scene, we learn that three people in an apartment without water are using a bucket as a toilet). On a bench, an elderly poet declaims verse while two old ladies gossip. The poet admits his verse is pretty bad. In giant close-up, someone picks up a distressed-looking black fish -- the things seems inedible. Again, we hear the "Chiquita" song. Some well-dressed women are looking for a lost dog. Some hooligans taunt a mentally retarded man and beat him up. Then, bystanders beat up the hooligans. The retarded man fishes a pink slipper out of a murky pond of grey-brown water. Someone pitches a big barrel through the window of a tenement, narrowly missing a baby in its crib -- the people in the apartment shout and complain. A plump guy, first seen observing the hooligans bullying the retarded man, goes to his apartment where a young woman, possibly his daughter, is doing a seductive, slinky dance to an American pop song. The plump man with owl-like glasses keeps caged songbirds and he plays with them. Meanwhile a big cat, standing up like a man leans on a bird-cage hoping to get at the canary within. The plump man chases the cat and tries to beat it. This causes the dancing woman to attack him and they fight with the cat in the man's arms, tucked there like a football. Nikolai goes to a house where he devours three cans of caviar. He and one of the women in the house get into a fight over his gluttony and his hand is cut by a knife. (Nikolai, who says he is a writer, has been allowed to come home from work to work on his novel or short story -- but he's not inspired to write anything.) At another flat, filled with teacups, painted china, among mugs and small paintings, the fat vice-principal meets with a young man, possibly a student from school. The blonde vice-principal removes some of her clothes. The young man has been waiting for her, lolling on a settee and cradling a trumpet in his hand. The young man and the woman talk and she eats a big bowl of some rather noisome-looking soup. Then, she takes the trumpet and plays "Strangers in the Night" (not too well) while an orchestra swells to accompany her on the soundtrack. We see a painting of an angel with a trumpet. This picture turns out to be in a bureaucratic office where people are bickering to the point that a secretary begins to sob. Nikolai is seen in a dark, closet-like anteroom trying to get into a suite of chambers. In the rooms, naked people are posed next to tureens foaming with dry-ice fog. The naked women are shapely and, it seems, as if some sort of pornographic movie is being made. (There is lots of full frontal male nudity as well in this film, starting with the homeless man that the widow picked-up, and, also, featured in the scene showing the porno-shoot.) Nikolai finally figures out how to get into the suite and wanders around with dazed-looking party-goers reaching at last the opulent chamber where the dirty movie is being made. There he falls asleep again -- this is about the fourth time, we have seen him sleeping in the middle of crowds and noisy chaos. (In Russian films, naked people have startlingly white skin.) Nikolia, then, appears in scene at the school, filmed against a floor to wall image of autumnal trees. The teachers are vigorously debating their role in a State that no longer expects them to produce slaves. Again, this is too much for Nikolai and so he falls asleep, snoring loudly as his colleagues argue. We see the students in the school, a bunch of disrespectful and ugly brats, pressed up close to a grated window like monkeys in a zoo -- this image will rhyme with pictures in the extremely disturbing next sequence. The sound track burbles with animal sounds, roaring and growling and barks. Some battered-looking dogs are playing in a courtyard in front of grim industrial building. The ladies looking for a lost dog go inside. Trucks are coming and going and the thuggish workers recite again and again this question: what is harder to catch? a cat or a dog or a venereal disease? When the women enter the impound building, they are paralyzed in horror, hold their noses at the stench, and begin to weep. Filthy cages are crowded with hundreds of mangy abandoned dogs, too sick and weak to even bark. Some of the dogs are wounded or blind; many are covered with swarms of flies. Muratova lingers on horrific shots depicting the injured and dying dogs for five or six minutes, then, interposes a titles that says something like: "You don't like seeing this. I don't like seeing it either. This has nothing to do with good or evil." Nikolai wakes up in a madhouse where an inmate is talking very objectively and calmly about having a chest full of writhing snakes. In an image out of Brueghel (and much of this part of the film looks like paintings by that Master), we see insane people wandering around in a snowy courtyard, fighting and wrestling. A woman comes to the madhouse and says that she loves Nikolai and wants to marry him. He agrees. They set forth by subway to go to his home for the wedding. Another woman shrieks obscenities at the camera, howling like an animal. (It was this tirade of verbal abuse that got the film banned, together with all the male nudity.) On the subway, Nikolai falls asleep and can't be awakened. The train comes to the end of the line and everyone has to get out. Nikolai's bride tries to arouse him but can't and, frustrated, begins to punch and claw at him. Nikolai falls on the floor of subway car. The woman leaves and the train departs, going who knows where, with patterns of light and dark illumining the man sprawled on the floor of the car. The "Chiquita" song plays again.
This summary leaves out about a third of the events, digressions, and inexplicable chaos in the film's second part. For instance, in the scene in the madhouse, the insane man's account of the serpents in his bosom is interrupted by fragmentary monologues from other inmates. The mise-en-scene resembles Alexei German's films -- the shots are crammed with people all crowded together among piles of stuff, mildewed overstuffed furniture, knickknacks. books and manuscripts, carpets on the walls, every kind of junk. The porn scenes feature a naked woman, a naked man with long hair, but, then, also a half-dozen grips and cameramen and doped-up partygoers. Apparently as a gesture toward feminism, Muratova includes not one but eight or nine shots of naked men, filmed with full frontal nudity -- if we are going to see naked women, we will see penises as well. The editing harkens to silent Soviet films, cutting away to illustrative images that seem to be metaphoric, but that are, often, very difficult to interpret. The movie is hectic, crowded, with confusing transitions and hosts of characters who we can't recognize and who simply come and go. There are philosophical arguments about teaching, life and death, Shakespeare, and so on -- but the arguments often seem inane, shallow, and half-baked. It seems that Muratova perceives the collapse of the Soviet union, obviously imminent at the time the movie was made, as inspiring agitation, even hysteria among the people in the movie -- although there is no trace of political discourse in the picture, except, perhaps, the debate about pedagogy. There are two possible reactions to the chaos that seems ubiquitous -- you can mourn the death of the old regime (the widow's husband is dead-ringer for Stalin) and lash out at people or you can opt-out by simply canceling your consciousness, that is, falling asleep. These seem to be the only two alternatives -- fight or flight (by narcolepsy). This interpretation seems opportunistic, derived from the fact that the Soviet Union's authority over East Germany collapsed with the Wall in 1989 and that the Soviet Union itself dissolved two years later. From accounts I have read of other Muratova films, all of them more or less suppressed, these pictures also seem quite chaotic and digressive, although not to demented level of The Asthenic Syndrome. "Asthenic" describes Nikolai's condition -- the word means "weakness." Whatever the politics of the situation, Muratova seems inclined toward violence, chaos, and savage bickering.
In the immediate post-Soviet era, Russian films are described as exercises in chernukha -- that is, "bleak" films. These pictures are said to depict the malaise and confusion accompanying the dissolution of the Soviet empire -- day to day despair is shown by depictions of byt, a word that means "slice of life" imagery. The Asthenic Syndrome is often said to represent this kind of film-making. Muratova seems to feel that human existence in general is a parade of folly, misery, and sadism. (I understand that she also made equally chaotic comedies and romances that were not overtly despairing -- over her career, Muratova directed more than forty films.) An idea as to her sensibility is reflected in her comment on Ingmar Bergman. Muratova admired Bergman and he was an influence on her early films but later she said: "I don't like Bergman any more. He is not barbaric enough for me."
The Asthenic Syndrome won the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1990. Muratova was born in Moldova, then Romania and spent her entire life working in Odessa. She regarded herself as a Ukrainian filmmaker. She died in 2018 at age 86. Recent propaganda postings on YouTube claim her as a proud Ukrainian artist.
No comments:
Post a Comment