MIFF Session 14: DEAR COMRADES

Cold war USSR. Kruschev's in the Kremlin and Kennedy's in the White House. Lyuda, careworn from war and struggle has reached a position of comfort as a Party official in her Don district factory town. The Soviet Union is suffering shortages and the price of everything has just gone up. This fills the stores with people clamouring for basics. Lyuda rises from her adulterous bed goes to the shop and walks right past the crowds to get first pick at the new supplies in a backroom. The store manager lets slip a complaint about the conditions and gets a verbal slap from Lyuda about the need to keep faith in the Party and wear these hard times for better things ahead. There is no irony in her face. She goes home, chastises her father for keeping his old Bolshevik uniform and warns her daughter to keep away from the threatened strike action at the factory. Teenage Svetka storms out. Lyuda goes off to work in the offices of the factory as the workers amass in the quad below the window.

The massacre at Novocherkassk in 1962 remains a governmental atrocity on the scale of Bloody Sunday. The army was called in but more as a presence. KGB snipers on the rooftops ensured panic and rioting. The army was ordered to lock and load and fired on its own people. Twenty-two dead and many, many wounded. The cover up was much swifter than the military action and by its close, with all the bodies buried anywhere they could be and all witnesses leaving their signatures on secrecy statements. Lyuda does that but has no idea of where her daughter is, assuming she's still alive.

The search for Svetka is a progress through totalitarian officialdom (and around it) as it is trying to plaster over a bungled action that would embarrass it internationally. What's one more young troublemaker to them? Increasingly, what's the value of hollow Party rhetoric to her? This transformation isn't what it might have been in a lesser telling. Lyuda, clearly hypocritical in her actions from the beginning of the story, is confronted with the effects of her own zeal. She had stood at a Party meeting that was to decide on miltary involvement and demanded the instigators and all rioters be punished to the extent of the law. Svetka, missing and likely buried, was one of the victims of her eagerness to please the Party. Somewhere in all of that the maternal anguish exploding within her is screaming. Letting too much of that out in the open at the wrong time could get her thrown to the corpse pile or at best in a prison where she will never have a name again. Does she still, as she has said more than once, wish Stalin were still alive?

Russian films about the Soviet era cannot afford to make missteps. Like any totalitarianism this one's propagandist culture is easily depicted as either risible or deadly. The temptation to produce statements from the other extreme and rewrite history to villify past generations must be enormous. It's not as though there hasn't been Russian cinema that sidestepped or challenged the status quo from within it. Tarkovsky always works as an example but if you really want problematic try Ellem Klimov's Come and See, a devastating portrayal of warfare set in the Nazi occupation of Belarus in which no one escapes the stain of inhumanity and even images of Hitler become problematic (you'll have to see it to find out why). Here, one of the Party faithful appears to be forced into opposition to the workings of the Party. You are not going to care about that until the stakes have less to do with Apparatchik s A, B or C being nasty pasties than the life and death of the sole reason why you struggle through. Lyuda is not confronted with the flaws of the Soviet system but her own.

Dear Comrades is shot in the ol' Academy near-square ratio and in rich black and white and is one of those instances where digital video gets to look almost exactly like film. I always wonder at this decision. The black and white of a film like Playlist is hipster like its chief source of derivation. The choice here seems guided by the tradition from the 1970s onward to depict former eras the way they would look if shot at the time. Dear Comrades is in black and white to draw the theme of its tough times close to the plainness of the treatment. Personal principles look bigger in black and white and when they are delivered in directed contradiction to the assumption of privilege that looks bigger, too.