Film Review: Brief Encounters

A review of the second film of our fall series, “The Long Farewell: The Films of Kira Muratova,” by Chloe Papadopoulos, Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters (Korotkie vstrechi) was completed and debuted in 1967, placing it just outside Khrushchev’s ottepel’ or Thaw. It is Muratova’s first solo directorial project. Previously, Muratova had co-created three films with her then-husband. Upon its completion, Brief Encounters was given the lowest-category release and “shown largely in film clubs, often by Muratova herself, who toured the country with one of the few prints.”^[1] Her second film, The Long Farewell (Dolgie provody, 1971), which we will be screening on November 14, was banned entirely. These two films have historically been linked by their twin, mirror-image titles– they, moreover, have come to represent a distinct moment in the development of Muratova’s aesthetics and style: both are some of her only films shot entirely in black and white and both faced push-back from the censors on similar grounds. Muratova dubbed both “provincial melodramas.” This, despite the fact that neither truly conform to the genre of melodrama. The irony of such a generic characterization, reproduced rather literally on the film’s Russian Wikipedia page, is that the film is palpably lacking standard melodramatic tropes and any tangible conclusion. Jane Taubmann writes that the film’s “crisis” can be found in its characters’ “recognition of reality, not a change in that reality itself.”^[2]

This ambiguous message, underlying the love triangle plot, was a cause for concern with censors. Alongside its implicit critique of Soviet bureaucratic linguistic register, the film’s non-chronological sequencing was the primary cause for its limited distribution. The non-linear structure departed drastically from Socialist Realist conventions. The effort that it takes on the part of the viewer to deduce the film’s fabula from its siuzhet does not accord with Socialist Realism’s requirement that cinema be “intelligible to the masses.” Its lack of intelligibility arises primarily from its three timelines – two of which are embedded as flashbacks in the film’s diegetic present. Taubman and Lilya Kaganovsky count sixteen flashbacks, none of which are given in chronological order. The film’s overarching structure is also somehow circular, with the final flashback connecting back to the moment when Nadia arrives at Valia’s home in the film’s beginning. Kaganovsky, using Laura Mulvey’s term, calls this “delayed cinema”; “a cinema whose final meaning is permanently postponed or deferred.”^[3] “Time no longer flows in one direction (always toward a clear Utopian future),” writes Kaganovsky, “but is halted, frozen, rewound, fragmented, and erased.”^[4] The film only “gains meaning through retroactive understanding” (Freud’s Nachtraglichkeit) and its “resolution is permanently suspended.”^[5] Kaganovsky argues that Muratova employs the motif of waiting and deferral, a standard trope of melodrama, as a particular kind of female labour that is thematized from the very first moment of the film with the ticking clock.

In this way, the film’s organization lends itself to gendered readings. The film is often seen as a women’s film. The co-writer, Leonid Zhukovitsky, is quoted as having said that the short story off of which half the film was based was “a man’s story,” but that, as she treated it, “it became clear that [Muratova] wanted to make it a women’s film.”^[6] This designation is rooted not only in the female-predominant cast, but is also provoked by the primacy of female point of view. The women’s subjective point of view as rendered through memory accounts for nearly half of the film’s run-time and the women’s relationship with each other is, ultimately, the one that the viewer becomes invested in. Maksim does not exist in the present of the film; in the film’s present, he is nothing but absence; he is “mediated but never immediate,” “a disembodied voice reproduced by the tape recorder.”^[7] Lida Oudakerova writes that the plot centers around the unbridgeable gaps between its male and female characters, reflected in the reshaping of hierarchy that Muratova achieves in her representation of space.[8] Note how her frames focus on unmotivated details (sometimes in the manner of painterly still life), creating unconventional shots that endlessly reproduce and estrange space. Oudakerova, in particular, reads Muratova’s attention to blank walls as a mirroring of the film-screen itself – as a feminine locus of creation and reproduction.

Alongside her formal innovation, we also find Muratova’s talent for representing human relationships; relationships between her characters and those characters’ relationships to the world in which they live. One of the ways she does so is through her focus on language and communication. As a student at VGIK, from which she graduated in 1959, Muratova studied under and was mentored by Sergei Gerasimov. Speaking about him, Muratova said, “Gerasimov taught me to listen to human intonation, to notice how people talk, and to love that.”^[9] It was often, allegedly, the speech of non-professionals that provoked Muratova to cast them – in this film, the man at the café being one (he was actually a circus clown) and Liuba being another. Taking the opening scene as an example of Muratova’s talent for manipulating speech and sound, we see that she very subtly plays with diegetic sound and speech to create meaning. The film’s opening shot shows us a disordered domestic space and the woman who inhabits it. The viewer hears the sound of Valia’s pencil, a ticking clock, and, for the first time, her oft-repeated “dorogie tovarishchi.” Within the first minute of the film, then, the viewer already knows that this woman is a functionary. Her education and class are underscored by her parodying of Shakespeare; she turns ‘to be or not to be’ into ‘to wash or not to wash’ (myt’ ili ne myt’); she then engages Figaro’s aria from The Marriage of Figaro, rhythmically repeating “naplevat’.” Neither the playful speech, nor the Soviet rhetoric is privileged. Both of these manners of speaking are simply presented and lack enthusiasm. Her telephone etiquette soon after also underscores her uneasy relationship to hierarchy and boundary.^[10] Muratova has her character deliberately repeat “dear comrades” throughout the film, draining the words of meaning until we finally hear them reproduced on the tape recorder as literal mechanical reproduction, which Nadia erases with indignation at Valia’s flawed belief that she can effect change in a countryside, about which she knows nothing.

The love triangle plot favours Muratova’s complex structuring principle, a principle that is also motivated by the movement between country and city. From the late fifties to the early sixties, men often stayed behind in cities following their mandatory military service. This drained the countryside of males, leaving women with no marriage prospects; a historical fact that is played out in the film. The film is set in a ‘provincial city,’ Odessa (provincial in that it is far from Moscow, the center). The film features notable architectural and natural landmarks of Odessa, as well as a distinctly southern dialect in characters like Liuba (a milkmaid who Muratova met while filming Our Honest Bread/Nash chestnyi khleb in 1964). Written in collaboration with Zhukovitsky, the film’s plot is closely tied to the city’s chronic water supply issues. The city actually inspired the writers’ creation of the heroine-bureaucrat and, subsequently, motivated the decision to create a free-spirited love interest to counter to her ‘rigidity.’ Valia is played by Muratova herself and her quasi-husband, the geologist Maksim, is played by the famous anti-establishment Soviet bard, author, actor Vladimir Vysotsky. Nadia, the co-heroine to Valia, is played by the then-rising-star, Nina Ruslanova. The film also stars many non-professional actors, which Muratova is famous for favouring. Interestingly, Muratova did not want to cast Vysotsky initially; she had originally asked Stanislav Liubsin to play the part, but because of a conflict Vysotsky ended up filling the role. Valia’s part was originally given to a theatrical actress – the early rushes, however, displeased Muratova, who ultimately stepped in to play to the role. As for Nadia, in 1999, Muratova said of Nina Ruslanova that if she hadn’t discovered her “then in five minutes someone else would have. She was such a striking person.”^[11]

The great fame Ruslanova and Vysotsky attained in the decades after the film was shot had some effect on its later popularity. It was, after all, only in 1986 that Brief Encounters attained success with a wide release. In that year, the new reformist leadership of the Union of Soviet Filmmakers initiated a ‘Conflicts Commission,’ which, effectively, led to the unshelving of many films of the previous three decades. One of the first films to be taken off the shelf was Brief Encounters, which had been censored for its “incompatibility with the aesthetic canons of Socialist Realism.”^[12] At this time, Muratova experienced “something like popularity.”^[13] Brief Encounters, along with The Long Farewell, were even shown with some frequency on Soviet television.