Piter FM

I figured out pretty quick that this was going to be the typical "chick flick" type of thing but then it started getting annoying because the two main characters didn't have their typical serendipitous meeting that leads them to their happy ending. But I suppose that wouldn't make a lot of sense, since apparently Russians make fun of that staple in many American movies. It also makes this movie more realistic though, in a sense, because stuff like that doesn't really happen to normal people. It did bother me though in the scene right after Max drops the phone into the river and they walk right past each other and its just kinda like, come on...that level of irony seemed a little crazy.That kind of thing doesn't happen in real life either.

Overall, I'd say this one was OK. It was interesting and entertaining enough but it lacked a certain continuity. I couldn't quite figure out Maxim as a character. He seemed kind of just like a regular guy, but then he ha that weird little hole-in-the-wall apartment and strange friends. I guess the best word I can think of for him would be impulsive. He was always just like go with the flow and went with whatever came at him. Masha was eccentric and fun and also a spontaneous type of person, but in a much more lighthearted way that Maxim seemed to be. Maybe that's because we meet him as his girlfriend leaves him for someone else, though.

Visually there were a couple of things in this ilm that I really enjoyed, in prticular the scene where Maxim's "ex" Miranda was sitting with her fiancee, next to that window with all the water running down it. I loved the distortion of the view there, when Maxim shows up creepily watching her through the water, like he is melting away in her mind and replaced by the solid image of the new guy. I also liked the transitions in this with the radio static and the flashes of different buildings in the city. Also, the scene where Maxim is looking around at everything in the city and takes pictures on the phone at interesting angles. I liked seeing more of his viewpoint, and honestly that seemed like something I would totally do in that city, to the point of running into somebody (I've done this before walking around with my Canon...) so I guess that was something relatable for me individually.

I also liked his random German phrases, which he didn't really get right. He was talking about studying English and German, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't true since he didn't say anything in English for the whole movie. He also said lieblings (favorite) wrong, so that it sounded more like lieben (love) and I kind of wonder if they threw that in there on purpose.

This whole movie makes me think of this song with lyrics written by British author Nick Hornby and performed by Ben Folds.

The Return

I didn't really 'get' this one. The father came out of nowhere and was totally a jerk most of the time to his sons that he hadn't seen in apparently 12 years. I didn't know what he was supposed to be doing for his business, I almost got suspicious when he went to buy what turned out to be the motor, I thought it might be a dead body he was transporting or something! I was totally suspicious of him from the start. He just seemed like a really scummy guy and I don't know why the mother would have let them go with him, she seemed to make sure to distance herself from him, too.

In retrospect I think the opening "Sunday" scene might have been shown out of sequence, with that diving episode occuring maybe ater everything else that we see in the movie, except for the fact that the other boys make fun of Ivan on "Monday"... I think that might make more sense to be out of order though, because I'm sure the event resulting in the father's fall would be very traumatc for Ivan.

That being said, I was on Ivan's side for most of the movie. I didn't really understand why Andei wanted the father to approve of him so much when he'd been out of their lives for so long. I'd be mad at him, too. And especially once he starts pulling all those mean moves - kicking them out of the car repeatedly, hitting them, forcing them to be subordinate to him - I would be afraid of what he would do. I think the older brother was probably in a really hard position, being between the father and his little brother. He would want to protect his brother, which would involve not getting the father angry, and maybe thats why he was such a suck up,  to try and keep the father contented enough so that he would not hurt either of the boys, especially the younger one for being so defiant.

This was another movie where I was waiting for something bad to happen. I thought it would happen to the boys though, with the father's attitude toward them. I thought it was very strange that after the freak accident was when all of a sudden both the boys semmed to care about the father - only in retrospect once he had died. With as nasty as he had been to them, that caught me off-guard. I also thought it odd that they felt the need to take the body all the way back with them (also the absence of blood of any kind on the body - a fall from that height wouldve definitely broken something...) even though they had been talking about hurting him and getting away from him, when they were finally free of him, they felt the need to burden themselves with his dead body.

The whole movie was really creepy, and eerie. I still don't know what kind of shifty thing the father was involved in. did anyone else remember the ammunition box underneath the seat of the boat? That seemed to be his reason for going out to the island at all, and we never learn what is inside of it, because after he digs it up he chases Ivan up the tower from whch he falls and subsequently dies. And we never find out what happens to the boys, either - how do they explain this all to their mom? Yeah so...dad kind of had this freak accident after smacking us around for like 3 days....

I don't know if that's believeable.

Brother

'Brother' dir. Aleksei Balabanov, 1997

This flm atruck me as similar to something like "The Godfather" but in Russia and with a ton less gore (which I am totally fine with). There's quite a bit of action invovled but in the end nothing is really resolved. I guess now would be a good time to mention that gangster movies aren't my favorite genre, though I have seen a few of them thanks to my brother. I was actually really glad that there wasn't a ton of blood and stuff in this movie, even though it was about the mob.

At first I thought the actor was using his real name, but the last name of the character is just really similar. He seemed like a halfway decent guy, except for the whole shooting nails into people with a sawed-off shotgun thing - cause he would let the innocent people go instead of shooting them too for "knowing too much" or whatever. He also made a point to use his power to help the good people who were being harrassed, like the guy on the bus and his German friend. I think he was more of a believeable person than some of the guys in those Godfather movies. I think the army probably hardened him to the effect of violence and made him good as a mobster. He didn't really show much emotion for most of the movie. I think the music helped him to get away from what was happening to him and provided an escape for his emotion. He was the most excited in the concert scene. It also literally saved his life when the other hitman shot him in the walkman, but it just broke and he was OK. He doesn't seem to like foreigners at all, but having been in the army and in a war, I suppose that would make sense that tha foreigner is seen as an enemy.

I wonder what the mom thought Viktor was really up to in St. Petersburg. She seemed so proud of him, I'm sure she didn't know what he was really up to. If she had, I bet she would have thought better of Danny for going into the army. I didn't really get why she was so disapproving of him. Or the whole opening sequence, either. He just walked through a video set and someone beat him up? It seemed a little random. I guess the significant part of it was that he said he didn't want to be a cop. I wonder if that's because there was so much corruption in this time - but then he goes on instead to be a mobster.

I don't know why his brother would have turned him in, unless it was just a situation to save his own butt - I'm never good at following who's who in these movies. I thought it was weird too how the other gang guy called Viktor a "Tatar" but Danny didn't look Asian at all and yet they were supposed to be brothers. I thought Chechnya was interesting too, because I'd heard about it before but never knew where it was or anything. t's actually a relatively small area near Georgia and I think that its kind of weird that Russia would fight so hard to keep a small area, when bigger pieces like Georgia and Ukraine and all of those "-stan" countries ended up breaking off and becoming independent after the fall of the USSR. Maybe that hadn't quite happened yet, at this point? Or those were territories that had been previously independent and annexed by the USSR, or something? I don't know. It just seems weird to me.

I think that's all I have right now, apologies if it didn't all quite make sense, I'm on some meds for this super cold.

day eleven - The Thaw

'Ballad of a Soldier' dir. Grigory Chukhrai, 1959.

To be honest, I spent most of this movie just waiting for something bad to happen to the main character Alyosha, just because of the foreboding opening shot. We are told at the beginning that he "never made it home from the war", so I assumed that he was not going to make it home for leave. When the train got attacked (bombed, perhaps?) I was like OK, I bet this is it. That sucks, to get so close and get killed. I thought he would be shown doing something heroic - saving the Ukranian kids - and then he would die as a result of the accident. But he didn't! He made it all the way home but just for a few minutes. Then he couldn;t find his mom, and I thought aw man, she's gonna miss him by like 30 seconds, that sucks! And then she didn't! But you only get to see him for like 3 minutes, that really does suck! So it was a happy, yet sad ending since he did get home, but he had to leave right away.

One thing I didn't get was that everyone seemed to be really respectful of him as a soldier and are willing to help him out and everything, EXCEPT for the scene of the morning after the trainwreck. Then they were all like, get out of our way, you're not good for anything! And that threw me off. The people right around where he lived were more like that to him, and that seemed backwards to me since hose people were more likely to know him personally. It wasn't like, oh hey Alyosha! It was, go away!

I'm not feeling the best today, so this might end up being a bit short. I might come back to it a little later and add something more.

day ten - Seemingly Random

'Mirror' dir. Andrey Tarkovsky, 1974


This was a strange film, not going to lie. But I did enjoy some of the poems in the "voice over". I'm not really sure where to start with it because I feel like there's something to "get at" but at the same time like it can't be fully "solved".

I think the title of 'Mirror' is there because there seem to kind of be two sets of people that re being talked about at the same time. There was some convoluted linearity to it for the first few scenes at least, excludng the one before the opening credits. there was a lot of emphasis placed on things like imagination and dreams, which is represented by the idea of going through a looking glass, similar to the Alice in Wonderland concept. At first I thought that the main voice over was speaking to his mother while going in and out of dreams about her where he sees her as his girlfriend or ex-wife or whatever she is, who she has a son with. At least, that's how I wanted to tie it together.

I thought it was weird how we never see the main person who does the "voice over". I thought maybe that could be explained because if he is the one dreaming for most, or all of the time, it could be the type of thing where you yourself are in the dream and we were percieving it all through his eyes.

I think we might have watched this today because of all the historical footage that was thrown in there in between the scenes witht he actors in them. They also alluded to the fact that it was "wartime", and in the scene when the "voice over" is talking to his mother, the year 1935 was mentioned and thats during the purges...which would explian why the menntioned father left and is no longer in the picture (light bulb moment right there, is what that was).

There were some things that showed up as motifs that I noticed mainly when they recurred right near the end, namely the rush of wind, the bird that landed on the kid and got caught (smashed?) but then was set free in the end, and the book with the religious images in it.

New idea. What if the main voce-over guy was dying and that was what he was thinking about? The end scene we did actually see him, I think, on his deathbed. His life was possibly 'flashing before his eyes', in a sporradic and non-linear fashion?

I'm not really sure, but those are my guesses. The guy in the first scene had been asking the girl about perception, what she thought about it, etc. Maybe it was just trying to show the complexity of a mind?

I'm curious to talk about it tomorrow and see.

day nine - WWII Era Film

'Ivan the Terrible, Part I' dir. Sergei Eisentstein, 1944.

I was just looking up where Kazan is, and it's really not where I thought it was. I figured it would be much further East since the people portrayed there looked very Asian in comparison to most of the ruling people in the Moscow area. But it's actually much closer to the European side of Russia, just more South toward the border with modern-day Kazakhstan, which I suppose also makes sense. I thought maybe it would not actually be a part of Russia anymore, but instead inside the borders of one of the Eastern European republics that became independant states after the dissolution of the USSR. It's actually surprisingly close to Moscow.
Here is a map of where Kazan is.

Wikipedia exaplins the Tatar people as a 'Turkic' ethnic group and says that today:
Volga Tatars number nearly 8 millions, mostly in Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. While the bulk of the population is to be found in Tatarstan (nearly 2 million) and neighbouring regions, significant numbers of Kazan Tatars live in Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus. Outside of Tatarstan, urban Tatars usually speak Russian as their first language (in cities such as Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Tashkent, Almaty, and cities of the Ural and western Siberia) and other languages in a worldwide diaspora.

I was curious about them just becuase I didn't really know about it before. And because I had seen an emblem for "Tartary" on a circus wagon representing Asia and I've been wondering about that ever since. I didn't know that groups like that lived so close to Europe, I guess my mind wants to place them much closer to places like China and Mongolia, but I suppose it would make sense for them to be there since it is relatively close to Turkey, and they are thought of (in the Western perception, anyway) as being in between Asia and Europe. It's interesting to think where the line is drawn between European and Asian peoples. (stupid senior sem, now I am thinking of Orientalism, which I used in my thesis, bah!)

But anyway, thinking about the actual film, it is funny to think that there are Asian-Russians, since we think so much about Russia being part of Europe, especially since much of the population and bigger cities are closer to Europe than to Asia. So, Ivan really did do a lot to incorporate such a huge area into one single governing republic. I'm curious as to how exactly Russia looked right before the advent of the USSR, if all of the smaller 'republics' that it incorporated were independent in between Ivan and communism or they finally became their own countries afterward? I guess I don't know much about that part of the world.

Re-directing myself again...the assignment sheet mentions Eisenstein's interest in Japanese Kabuki theatre.
This short video is a nice explanation of the basics of Kabuki.

Given that information, I can see why the acting style was so overdramatic. It is very similar in style. One thing specifically I noticed about almost all of the actors in the film was that they always seemed like they had to have their eyes open as widely as humanly possible at all times, to make for really dramatic expressions, which I think might be Eisenstein's replacement for the special makeup that simplifies the facial features, making them clearly stand out. There was also a lot of posing, where someone would say something and stare in a 'dramatic pose', which according to Kabuki, helps to define characters.

I find it odd that this mimicking of Japanese style would be accepted in the USSR, especially during WWII, given that the Japanese were allied with Nazi Germany who were causing the USSR so much grief. The one text, however, seems to imply a naievete on behalf of some of Stalin's higher-ups regarding Eisenstein's foreign influences and willingness to take the risk of putting his own opinions and spins on things into his film. I could easily see the parallels between the story being portrayed of Ivan and the figure of Stalin, which probably kept them happy. It was obvious to me that the boyars were meant to represent bourgeoise culture, who are said to want all the power for themselves. I must say, until I read the assignment sheet, I thought that the main boyar who poisoned Ivan's wife was a man. I had no idea.

I think that's all I have for right now.

day eight - Red Terror in Retrospect

'Burnt by the Sun' dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, 1994.

I find it interesting that this movie is named after a Russian version of an Argentine tango song that was originally written by a Polish composer - which was a popular song in the USSR during the 1930s. I find this to be odd, that something as foreign and 'bourgeois' seeming as a tango number would be permitted to be played on the radio.

I looked it up since it is so significant for this film.
Click here to listen on Youtube

I also made a point to find the full translated lyrics, which on the Internet differ slightly from what the subtitles read in the film.
Click here to read translated lyrics of both Polish and Russian versions

I think it's so interesting trying to translate songs, since it has to be done without changing the melody, so often times phrasing is changed completely just so that it will fit. Both of these seem to have a very similar overall feel, but as you can see, they are very different versions of the same song.

In the subtitles Nadya would sing, "Burnt by the sun" followed by a line about the "crimson sea", which I understood at the end scene where her singing is heard while the camera focuses on Mitya who has killed himself by slitting his wrists in a bathtub, creating a literal 'crimson sea' by allowing himself to bleed. This final image of Mitya specifically in a bathtub goes back to his conversation on the beach with Marusia (the general's wife and also his own love interest) where he discovers her scars from when she tried to slit her own wrists, but explained that it had been unsuccessful because it 'needs to be done in water to keep the blood from coagulating'. I found it ironic that Marusia had tried to commit suicide because Mitya had left her unexpectedly, and Mitya did it in the end because of the guilt he felt for splitting up the family life she had built in his absence. I think the larger blanket meaning of the 'crimson sea' lyric translation, at least as it emotionally affected me, was that during this time the 'red' communist revolutionaries were killing so many people, and the crimson red color is significant because it can represent both the party in control under Stalin as well as the blood that they spilled.

The 'Burnt by the Sun' lyric that doubles as the film's title is translated in the above link as 'weary sun'. I think the parts of the film I was most confused by at first were the odd interludes where a small metaphorical "sun" floats around the house, always seen in conjunction with Mitya. At first, I couldn't figure out what that was supposed to be, because it flashed on screen so quickly. I'm still not entirely sure what its significance was, but clearly it was connected with Mitya, in that he was 'burning' down what the family had by his presence in the house as an agent of the secret police. The most memorable appearance of the small sun was when it cracked the frame of the old photograph, symbolically representing the way things used to be when Mitya had lived there as a child before the revolution. I didn't understand why Mitya had become involved with the secret police; it sounded like he had fled abroad, or had possibly been exiled, maybe because he was an artist? I'm not really sure.

I think Mitya was a very interesting character because it was clear that he cared about Marusia and also seemed to get attached to little Nadya (who, might I say, was really cute) but he was there to destroy their lives by taking away their husband and father on behalf of a government he really didn't seem to believe in. His internal conflict is what drives much of the emotional pull in the movie, and the other major contributor is the innocent child Nadya, who might be the only one who doesn't understand the gravity of the whole situation. All of the adults do a really good job of tricking her so she doesn't suspect anything. Even her father, who at first doesn't seem to believe Mitya when he says that the car will be coming. The whole film does a good job of painting a nice picture of a happy family in the countryside and slowly revealing the hidden issues, and finally building up to the suspense of having it all taken away when the car comes in the end and the general gets beaten up and the innocent lost civilian is shot for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mitya's suicide in the end is what causes the small metaphorical sun to fade out and die, but 'sun' could have multiple meanings, that the "sons of the revolution" were being "burned" in the terror campaign when Stalin purged his higher officers, and possibly also that Mitya was somehow related to the people in the house, and that he "burned" them by agreeing to turn them in to the government.

Mitya's character in this movie reminds me of a character Wiesler from a great German movie that is similar to this one, in that it is a retrospective drama made recently about an oppressive regime and involves a member of the secret police. Das Leben der Anderen - in English, The Lives of Others - is about an agent who is assigned to spy on a playwright suspected of being anti-government in communist East Germany - ruled by extension by the USSR. I recommend it for people who enjoyed this movie, its excellent and one of my favorite foreign films.

I think that's all I have this time around.