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"Here starts Ukraine." Artist and soldier, the Red Army officer cum writer (Evgeniy Samoylov) recalls the old village in a darkness fitfully illuminated by enemy fire, the soil now choking on smoke once glowed with flower and fruit. A honeyed screen of poppies and haystacks and talking horses and runaway lions, the camera hurtles to keep up with the six-year-old self (Vova Goncharov). "In my mind's eye everything lived a double life," Dad (Evgeniy Bondarenko) might be stalwart statuary come to gruff life while Gramps (V. Orlovsky) is a tetchy warlock according to green-thumbed Mom (Zinaida Kirienko). A tyke's Eden before the revolution, a technocrat's future after the war. "Why was your song cut short so early?" Garden of childhood and river of memory, Dovzhenko ideas made to glisten by Yuliya Solntseva's rhapsodic flow—her visualization of his autobiographical reveries is a hymn to the man's creative paradoxes, the land's oneiric attributes, the medium's expressive capabilities. Unperturbed by the raven on a gnarled tree, the uncle (Aleksandr Romanenko) "wields the scythe like a good painter wields his brush," a rainbow arches over the fields that are his canvas. (Locked in a dispute with his neighbor, he brandishes a mighty log and leaves his toppled foes strewn across the meadow.) Wordsworth multiplied by Kuindzhi, a wondrous immersion of emotive sweep and lambent image. Souls have an aquatic side, says the ferryman in the Stygian gloom, some are as deep as the Dnieper and others are "bull piss." Elsewhere there's a flooded Easter, watery reflections dance over a Byzantine mosaic, the fulminating priest gets a proper dunking. From the candlelit cavern Solntseva cuts explosively to communism's modern steel, though the primordial crimson of the closing sunset confirms that Nature will have the last word. "You have given me enough gifts to last me my whole life." Tarkovsky distills the spiritual-elemental remembrance in The Mirror, Malick in The Tree of Life turns it into grandiose smog. Cinematography by Aleksei Temerin. With Boris Andreyev, Vyacheslav Voronin, Ivan Zhevago, and Iya Marks.
--- Fernando F. Croce |