Happiness (1935)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Happiness (1935) – A. Medvedkin

One of the final silent features from the Soviet Union, ultimately banned but rediscovered in the 1960s by SLON (Society for Launching New Work), a group of leftist filmmakers led by Chris Marker.  In fact, Marker was so impressed by this film and by director Alexander Medvedkin that he ultimately made a striking essay film about him and his life (The Last Bolshevik, 1993).  Judging by Happiness, Medvedkin did have a flair for the comic and surreal; the film is spiked with a few bizarre images (polka-dotted horse on a roof, a shack being stolen from within/underneath, long-bearded clergy wrestling for a lost wallet) inserted into a rollicking tale of a peasant and his journey into communism.  Initially, he envies a neighbouring rich man, despairing his own predicament enough to want to commit suicide (comically), but, ultimately, he and his wife find that happiness lies in the collective farm (kolkhoz).  I wouldn’t say the plot is as straightforward as that sentence makes it sound.  If there is a message here, selling the idea of the kolkhoz, it didn’t come across; perhaps this experiment backfired, as did Medvedkin’s “cine-train” which travelled around the USSR filming actual kolkhoz workers and showing them footage of themselves, apparently griping.  But as a picaresque and comic oddity from a very different time and place, it succeeds.