Vitaly Kanevski`s Soviet feature ”Freeze-Die-Come to Life” is the most spectacular cinematic product of the glasnost era; given the recent developments in the USSR, it may also be among the last.
The winner of the Camera d`Or for best first feature at last spring`s Cannes Film Festival (coincidentally, the previous year`s Camera d`Or winner, Ildiko Enyedi`s ”My Twentieth Century,” opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre), Kanevski`s autobiographical film is a devastating portrait of a society one step away from complete breakdown, seen from the disabused point of view of two children who have grown up within it.
Although the setting is a small mining town, Suchan, deep in the snow-covered Soviet Orient at the end of World War II, the conditions it depicts and the life it elucidates clearly have meaning for today.
Only a handful of films-among them Luis Bunuel`s ”Land Without Bread”
and Roberto Rossellini`s ”Germany Year Zero”-have ventured into this dangerous realm, where decay and devastation can be strangely beautiful as well as tragic, and mere survival represents a considerable triumph of the human spirit, if only because the rewards of survival are so meager.
The poverty of Suchan is so extreme that it attains, as in Bunuel`s classic pseudo-documentary on Spain`s Las Hurdes region, a surreal quality. Instead of a land without bread, this is a land without warmth.
Valerka (Pavel Nazarov), who appears to be a feisty 9 or 10, lives in a crowded, chilly workers` barracks with his unmarried mother (Yelena Popova), a woman of low tolerance and violent temper. Valerka`s home life consists of a series of random beatings and drunken serenades from his mother`s would-be lovers; school is summed up by the low-comic image of a student parade in honor of Stalin that must proceed through a square flooded with sewage, someone (Valerka, most likely) having poured yeast down the school toilet.
Suchan has two main industries-a coal mine and a prisoner-of-war camp-though it is difficult to tell them apart, so defeated are the inmates of both. The landscape of dirty snow is dotted with a Tarkovskian litter of rotting wood, mysterious pieces of scrap metal and poisoned foliage.
The one affectionate relationship Valerka manages to establish-though it`s an affection often expressed through conflict and frustration-is with Galiya (Dinara Drukarova), a tiny, round-faced girl who is his rival for the hot tea concession at the local market. She becomes his protector and counselor, helping him to recover a stolen pair of skates, or hiding him from the police after he causes the accidental derailment (in the film`s most mysterious and imposing image) of a freight train.
The dreamlike quality of the train wreck-the locomotive lazily tumbles on its side, as the soundtrack goes eerily silent-is echoed in many other disturbing throwaway images. A burning body is glimpsed hanging from a gallows; a madman-once a leading Moscow intellectual, now a prisoner-mixes his precious flour ration in the mud, creating little pies that he magnanimously offers to the children watching him.
Much of ”Freeze-Die-Come to Life” (the title refers to a Russian children`s game, like our ”Red Light, Green Light”) has been photographed with a highly mobile hand-held camera that mixes directly in the action. The point of view is that of an adult looking down on the child he once was, with a mixture of horror and regret.
At the beginning of the film, Kanevski`s voice is heard giving the order to start the action, and at the end he is heard again, though the second time he is ignored-the action he has set in movement has developed its own momentum, its own chaotic energy, and has escaped his control. The sense of a horrible impotence before a rapidly, madly self-destroying world is overwhelming. Here is a snapshot of a society plunging headlong into civil war.
”Freeze-Die-Come to Life” is being presented in Chicago by the Film Center of the Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson Boulevard
(312-443-3733), where it will be shown five times: at 4 p.m. Saturday, at 7:45 p.m. Sunday and Thursday, and at 4 and 8 p.m. Feb. 9.
”FREEZE-DIE-COME TO LIFE”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2
Directed and written by Vitaly Kanevski; photographed by Vladimir Brylyakov;
edited by Galina Kornilova; art direction by Yuri Pashigorev; music by Sergei Banevich; produced by Kanevski and Valentina Tarasova. An International Film Exchange release; five showings Feb. 2 through 9 at the Film Center of the Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson Boulevard, 443-3733. Running time: 1:45. In Russian with English subtitles. Not rated by the MPAA, but contains language and situations not suitable for children.
THE CAST
Valerka……………………………Pavel Nazarov
Galiya…………………………….Dinara Drukarova
Valerka`s mother……………………Yelena Popova
Vitka……………………………..Vyacheslav Bambushek
School principal……………………Vadim Ermolayev
