Lovers and Laziness

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MOSCOW DOES NOT BELIEVE IN TEARS Directed by Vladimir Menshov

Screenplay by Valentin Chiornykh

OBLOMOV Directed by Nikita Mikhalkov

Screenplay by Alexander Adabashyan and Nikita Mikhalkov

The Soviet cinema is one of the most prolific in the world, but most of its product is designed for home consumption --and many of its best films, failing tests of ideological purity, remain unseen even in the U.S.S.R. Now a film about contemporary Soviet life has won an Academy Award and another, based on a 19th century novel, is winning kudos in its American debut in New York. One is bright, one brooding; together, they exemplify official Soviet film making at its best.

It may not be Sputnik, but it is a surprise. Somehow one did not think of the Soviet Union as being full of women wearing smart suits, conducting complicated careers and wondering, of a lonely evening, where all the strong, decent and interesting men have gone. Certainly few would have guessed that the Soviets would be the first to turn out a thoroughly pleasing romantic comedy of the feminist persuasion. Next thing you know, someone will be trying to tell us the Japanese make better small cars than we do.

The mode of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears--this year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film--is a kind of patient realism. The style is not flashy, but it is satisfying because it makes clear just what the protagonist, Katerina (Vera Alentova), has suffered and sacrificed in order to earn her nice car and nice apartment and the right to those middle-aged tears that Moscow so distrusts.

The film is in two acts. In the first, Katerina is a young girl, circa 1958, living in a workers' dormitory. By day she toils in a factory; by night she studies to advance herself, and gets involved with a light-minded roommate's plan to entrap men by pretending to be more worldly than they are. There is a sweet giddiness to this passage, a nostalgic indulgence of youthful silliness--except that it is the women who are trapped. Katerina becomes pregnant and bears the child of the slick television-type who is briefly her lover, but presses ahead with a career anyway --there's steel under her shyness--and suddenly finds herself in life's second act.

This quick shift in time and perspective effectively symbolizes the stealthy passing of the years: one day you look up and find your child almost grown, your career at its peak and a strange emptiness in your heart. In Katerina's case, the void is filled when she meets Gosha (Alexei Batalov), a magical figure on the order of the Alan Bates character in An Unmarried Woman. The difference is that he has none of the latter's squishy glamour. Gosha is a workingman, an upholder of traditional male values, however humorously he states them, and a man who insists that a woman accept him on his own terms. Katerina does, for she is strong and wise, and braver than he in overcoming the class problem their match presents, even in an officially classless society.

The screenplay is full of colorful characters, and Director Menshov has provided a context as direct and likable as his heroine. Alentova makes the transition from young girl to mature woman with little apparent recourse to the makeup table. She effects the more difficult transition--from determination to vulnerability, from practicality to playfulness, from briskness to sympathy--even more brilliantly. It is she who makes this lovely film so memorably winning and true.

Oblomov is not a surprise. If the Soviets cannot make a decent adaptation of one of their own literary treasures, who can? And it is a delight, faithful to the soulfully comic spirit of Goncharov's novel--about a man who would rather sleep than fight the modern world--yet gracefully free-spirited in using cinema shorthand to keep the story moving.

That is not the easiest thing to do, since Oblomov spends the first half of the film either in bed or resisting efforts to get him up and moving again. The absentee owner of an estate that is going to pot (as he is), he first nodded off in the midst of a career in the tsarist bureaucracy, and all attempts to interest him in alternative occupations cause him to pull the covers more tightly over his head. Oblomov has seen the future--industrialization, go-getterism--and decided it doesn't work.

Alas for his peace and quiet, he has a boyhood chum named Stoltz, a hustler determined to remobilize his old pal. He personally dices vegetables in order to provide Oblomov with an energizing diet.

He brings the slugabed books and periodicals to force him to take an interest in the world. Stoltz even finds a woman who falls in love with Oblomov--and why not? He's so much sweeter and gentler than his tirelessly activist friend; and, as seen in the permanently puzzled eyes of Oleg Tabakov, Oblomov's ennui has a strange integrity. In his way, Tabakov is as mysteriously compelling as Garbo.

There is more at stake here than simple laziness. The adaptation makes much of the childish contentment Oblomov found at his doting mother's knee. As the film intercuts the adult story with the dozing country milieu of the boy's intense but innocent love, one comes to understand that Oblomov's objections to modernism are principled. Once he actually knew a better world that he cannot help trying to reembrace.

This sad tale is told slyly and wryly.

There are few big laughs in Oblomov, but it has something of the sotto voce subversiveness that Director Nikita Mikhalkov brought to A Slave of Love, his study of early Russian film makers. He knows how to generate moral and intellectual tension in unlikely places, how to speak for individuality in a place where it is not highly valued. In short, he is an artist--and a fine one. --By Richard Schickel

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