☆ ☆ ☆ 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.
