Issue 75 (2022) |
Aleksei Fedorchenko: Last “Dear Bulgaria” (Posledniaia “Milaia Bolgariia”, 2021) reviewed by Chip Crane © 2022 |
Aleksei Fedorchenko has become one of Russia’s most recognizable auteurs, establishing his visually sumptuous and narratively complex style with such films as First on the Moon (Pervye na lune, 2004), Silent Souls (Ovsianki, 2010), Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari (Nebesnye zheny lugovykh Mari, 2012), Angels of the Revolution (Angely revoliutsii, 2014), and Anna’s War (Voina Anny, 2018). His latest effort, The Last “Dear Bulgaria”,which is partly a screen adaptation of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Before Sunrise (Pered voskhhodom solntsa, 1943),is a laudable addition to his oeuvre.
The film tells three intertwined stories, playfully jumping back and forth between their distinct genres. The first story is that of the eponymous “Dear Bulgaria,” an apple developed by the father of the film’s protagonist, Leonid Ets (Il'ia Belov). The story is told with the simplicity of a fairy tale: his father bred together two varieties at the same moment that Leonid was conceived. The new apple was named for Leonid’s mother, who died shortly after giving birth. Unimpressive at first, the apple improves harvest after harvest, until it is the best apple that there is. As Leonid explains, “There is no apple like this one! It’s unique. Look at the height and width. The turnip shape and deep ridges. Weight: 227 grams. Fully resistant to frost and fungi.” But the orchard that grows these magical apples burns down, killing Leonid’s father and leaving only one apple behind. Leonid is determined to salvage the variety with this last apple, but he encounters one disaster after another: a couple of children eat half of the apple while he is not looking, ants carry off one of the seeds, and birds eat another. Eventually Leonid is left with a single seedling.
The second is a detective story. Following the orchard fire, which we are told happened shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Leonid is evacuated to Alma-Ata, ostensibly to grow a new orchard of “Dear Bulgaria” apples. He is immediately caught up in a mystery: the person who lived in his room before his arrival, the writer Semen Kurochkin, has disappeared without a trace and Leonid grows determined to discover what happened to him. This leads to a variety of encounters with his fellow evacuees—including a scientist seeking to develop a variety of medicines derived from carrot juice and an unnamed (but instantly recognizable!) director who is shooting a film about Ivan the Terrible—and with the locals, including his landlady (who becomes a romantic interest) and a menacing policeman. Following the conventions of the genre, each of these characters alternates between suspect and informant, but the core of his investigation involves delving into an autobiographical manuscript left in the room by the missing author, himself.
And this manuscript provides the film’s third story. Drawn from Zoshchenko’s Before Sunrise, it consists of a series of autobiographical vignettes selected by the author for their psychological resonance, as he seeks to uncover the source of his melancholy.[1] These stories follow the life of a young man in pre-Revolutionary Russia, his early romances, his service in the army, his work in a variety of jobs after the Revolution, his becoming a writer, and his marriage. It then turns to moments from his early childhood—moments when his parents showed him cruelty or love, stories told to him by his nanny, and a particularly terrifying trip to the zoo. With a few notable exceptions, the text of these scenes is taken directly from Zoshchenko.
The film returns to many of the concerns featured in Fedorchenko’s other films. His interest in life on the ethno-national and geographic periphery of Russia and the Soviet Union is evident in the dramatization the moment that Kazakhstan becomes the intellectual and artistic center of the state during wartime evacuations. His engagement with Zoshchenko and Eisenstein stems from his fascination with modernism and the avant-garde, but—as in Angels of the Revolution—he uses humor to undermine any tendency to let this fascination turn to hero worship: in the first cinematic encounter with Eisenstein (played as a maniac throughout the film by Aleksandr Blinov) he demands repeatedly and hilariously that the actor playing Ivan lift his beard higher and higher, until the scene descends into a parody of early Soviet acting exercises overrun by dancing oprichniks. There is an over-the-top, anything-goes use of imaginative visual devices, including puppetry, animation, and an elephant suit that lends the film a feeling of willful eccentricity. And perhaps most importantly, there is a constant juxtaposition between fiction and reality, setting real historical events, details, and documents against the transparent cinematic manipulation of these artifacts.
This is most clearly present in the scenes devoted to the central document of the film, Before Sunrise. In these scenes, the dialogue and voice-overs are verbatim transcriptions of Zoshchenko’s text, but Fedorchenko’s cinematic transformation of the document is foregrounded by a highly theatrical device: the screen is split into multiple planes, showing the events depicted from different perspectives. At times, these differing perspectives are physical: when Kurochkin and his lover have a conversation, the screen is divided into three images, one of each of them standing on a bridge, and another showing the water under the bridge flowing between them. In other scenes, the perspectives offer us a fragmented glimpse into the emotional life of the characters: a scene depicting Kurochkin’s unhappy marriage plays out between images of his wife sitting stoically and the writer at his desk, his back turned neglectfully to his spouse. In yet other scenes, the device allows for spectacular feats of the mise-en-scene. The conscious artistic crafting of each of these scenes is reinforced by the artificial backgrounds used throughout: each takes place on a set created from the same straw mats used to construct the sets in the film studio.[2]
In the final moments of the film, though, this well-ordered, well-crafted world is upended. Following an epiphany, Leonid thinks he has discovered the key to Kurochkin’s disappearance in his manuscript by the symbolic representation of repressed trauma. Shortly after, he lays out his theory, although we discover that the real cause is much simpler and much more sinister—the personal animosity of the police officer. In the same moment, Leonid is forced to confront his own repressed trauma, the knowledge that his father started the fire in the orchard, possibly self-immolating in despair of accusations that he was a wrecker and a spy. Just like that, the playfulness of the film is swept away by a menacing evocation of state power. The disaster continues as the sapling grown from the final seed of the “Dear Bulgaria” apple is eaten by a donkey.
Fedorchenko has acknowledged that his film can be read allegorically (it is hard to understand the police officer’s claim at the end of the film that the state needs “New people: optimists with bad memories”). He has suggested that a reason for undertaking the project is the prevalence of melancholy and depression among today’s intelligentsia (Maliukova 2021). But he does not let the film end without hope. Its final shot shows the seed stolen by the ant get pushed into the soil by the same children who ate half of the apple at the very beginning of the film; and a plant sprouts, in true fairy-tale fashion.
Notes
1] We are informed at the end of the film that Semen Kurochkin was one of Zoshchenko’s pseudonyms.
2] Fedorchenko claims to have purchased Russia’s entire crop of reeds to make the mats used in the film (Maliukova 2021).
Chip Crane,
South Georgia State College
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Works Cited
Maliukova, Larisa. 2021. “Vsem tvorchestvom Zoshchenko krichal: ‘Ia svoi!’ A on ne svoi.” Novaia gazeta 23 April.
The Last “Dear Bulgaria”, 2021
109 Minutes, color
Director: Aleksei Fedorchenko
Screenplay: Aleksei Fedorchenko, Lidiia Kanashova
Director of Photography: Artem Anisimov
Production Design: Aleksei Maksimov
Music: Andrei Karacev
Cast: Il'ia Belov, Konstantin Itunin, Dzhavakhir Zakirov, Alena Artemova, Aleksandr Blinov, Sergei Fedorov
Producers: Aleksei Fedorchenko, Andrei Savel'ev, Artem Vasil'ev, Dmitrii Vorob'ev
Aleksei Fedorchenko: Last “Dear Bulgaria” (Posledniaia “Milaia Bolgariia”, 2021) reviewed by Chip Crane © 2022 |