TODAY’S BEST BET: Robin Hood Steals Volga Sedans! Берегись автомобиля/Grand Theft Auto (USSR. Mosfilm, 1966)(Сhannel 5, 16:50 ). --> If you get the joke at the heart of Beregis/Auto, you get the Soviet Union, a society in which irony knew no limits and “found humor” was literally all around you, just daring you to laugh…which was the risky part. The movie is based on the jocular metaphor of a Soviet Robin Hood – a morally upright socialist citizen who is pursued by the police, naturally, for taking morality into his own hands: he steals cars from “bad people” (who make “illegal income”) and gives them to good ones (OK, orphanages). With this suggestive premise E. Ryazanov began an unbroken string of 7 serio-comic hit films that ran through Гараж/Garage (1979), with the latter affirming that even if you could steal automobiles in good conscience, as in Beregis/Auto, there was still no safe place to park them! The Ryazanov Septet corresponded with the onset, entrenchment and fossilization of late-Soviet Глубокий застой (“Deep Stagnation 9”) and neatly defined the predominant modus vivendi’s of the High Brezhnev period – gaming the system and/or simple theft – but did so, remarkably, without getting the director incarcerated or, even curiouser, blackballed by Goskino. Eventually somebody’s dissertation will tell us why. Beregis’/Auto was ER’s first collaboration w/ screenwriter E. Bagrinsky and one of the best: the two carefully crafted a “good-hearted saddening comedy” (“добрую, грустную комедию”) about two “friendly enemies,” one representing the state and the other the individual. They are doomed to find themselves eternally at odds, the viewer understands, as the social system they inhabit can’t cope with abstract legality any better than it can abstract art. Yet however telling its plot and finely tuned its direction, Beregis’/Auto still wouldn’t succeed without its exceptional cast. The праведник-hero – a childlike naïf nicely dubbed Detochkin – is played by the only person who *could* have played him, in retrospect: I. Smoktunovsky, the actor of his generation, who could do (and did) everything from Chekhov to Shakespeare – indeed, he had just done his stunning turn as Hamlet for G. Kozintsev (Lenfilm, 1964) when Beregis’ came out, making the movies amateur play-within-a-film staging of the melancholy Dane a big “inside” joke that every contemporary Soviet viewer got immediately. Supporting, indeed matching Smoktunovsky as Detochkin’s Inspector Javert is O. Efremov in one of the great roles of a great career, making you *believe* in a Soviet police detective who both does his job and regrets its consequences – the only appropriate response there was to the Detochkin case – and on whose office wall in place of the standard Dzerzhinsky photo hangs a picture of…Stanislavsky! Beyond these two beacons of Soviet cinema, Beregis’/Auto offers a collection of supporting players that’s hard to match in *any* film of its era: A. Papanov, A. Mironov, E. Evstigneev, G. Zhzhenov – even D. Banionis (later the hero of Solaris) has a cameo as a bribe-taking Baltic pastor! Enough! Add Beregis’/Auto to your must-see list and tune it in after lunch today (or watch on YouTube below). Oh, and some free advice: if you (try to) drive in the Greater Moscow area, remember to keep your nose clean and your car insurance paid up. If today’s anti-corruption Robin Hoods start stealing cars, there’s no guarantee they’ll distinguish between your Škoda and Alexei Miller’s Lamborghini.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 10:41:21 +0000
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