It Rains in My Village

Eva Ras

Aleksandar Petrović's It Rains in My Village is a strangely compelling adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Demons (aka The Possessed) set in the now defunct nation of Yugoslavia. You don't need to be familiar with the (very long) novel to appreciate the Serbian director's 1968 effort since the film is very loose in its adaptation of what is my favorite book. Suffice to say, Petrovicć's thematic intentions align with that of the Russian master in that It Rains in My Village is a critique of revolutionary socialism. Tito and his regime were perceived as relatively benign in the West in 1968 due to Yugoslavia non-alignment with the Soviet bloc, but Petrović's film stands as a middle fingered salute to Tito and his minions. As in Demons, a nihilistic adherence to Party doctrine brings death and chaos to a rural village.

The backwardness of the village is immediately established in It Rains in My Village. A band arrives on bicycles to play at a wedding, but a female member of the band is sent packing in order to kowtow to local custom. The village is dirty and primitive. Most of the men seem under employed. Roaming pigs, ostensibly herded by the film's main character Trisa (Ivan Palüch), are the main traffic. There is a mute and crazed girl named Goca who functions as an unpaid sex worker for local laborers. Trisa hangs at the one lane bowling alley and pub where he is often the butt of Joska's (Mija Aleksić) teasings. Joska goads Trisa into marrying Goca with predictably tragic results.

At this point, the real villain arrives in the form of Reza (Annie Girardot), a sophisticated teacher with an urban background. She is also a painter and soon enlists the clueless Trisa as her model and boy toy. However, the audience knows she is a no goodnik when she disparages "religious mania" and addresses Trisa as "comrade". When a dashing pilot crash lands nearby, Trisa is soon displaced from Reza's boudoir. When Trisa is implicated in Goca's murder, Reza and Joska fan the fires of public opinion and the hive mind of a lynch mob takes over. Trisa is subjected to fiendish torture and death. The finale juxtaposes Trisa's traditional funeral with, in a nice satiric touch, a tractor ballet celebrating Tito's 100% support at the polls. The dead eyed stare of Reza at the village priest during the service rams home the message: big sister is watching.

Annie Girardot

Apart from divvying up the character of Nikolai Stavrogin between Trisa and Reza, the main difference between Demons and It Rains in My Village is the use of folk songs by Petrović. The wedding band, often joined by Joska, punctuates the action with songs that comment sardonically on what has transpired. A little levity goes a long way during this bleak, but brief (80 jam packed minutes) affair. Mija Aleksić was the most beloved Serbia entertainer of his generation, he eventually got his own postage stamp, and his musical digressions show why. He brings a very human face to a very evil character. The other leads are equally sublime. Palüch brings a solid presence to the simple minded shepherd. I remember Ms. Girardot for the deglamorized and put upon heroines she played in the 1970s and 80s, when Deneuve and Adjani got the glamour puss roles, so it was nice to see her so young and alluring. She gives her character just the right trace of a sneer. The role of Goca could have been a bad joke about female promiscuity, but the presence of Ms. Ras redeems the role. She makes her character a believable innocent. Because of her work with Dušan Makavejev, I've always found Ms. Ras to be the Serbian Shelley Duvall and that is, for me, high praise.

It Rains in My Village is the kind of near masterpiece that reassures me I have more to see before I shuffle off to Buffalo. Certainly I will be tracking down more films by Mr. Petrović. He didn't shy away from adapting classic novels as one of his later films was an adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, my favorite novel of the 20th century. The fact that he succeeded with the equally unfilmable Demons gives me hope.

 

My Joy

                         Viktor Nemets and Olga Shuvalova                     

Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy, released in 2010, is an inscrutable portrait of Russia as a paranoid wasteland. From its first shot, that of a cement mixer being used to help conceal a corpse, the mood of the film is that of unrelenting despair. The film could be dismissed as a Russophobic screed, but it is so teeming with vital storytelling that I was enthralled from start to finish. The film is ostensibly a road film, initially following Georgy (Viktor Nemets), a young trucker as he attempts to make a delivery in Western Russia. The film, however, is extremely discursive. It hurtles through time and space illustrating a host of fragmentary tales. When Georgy is joined temporarily by an old drifter, we view the reminiscences of his attempt to return home after World War 2 and come to learn why he is living a peripatetic life. After the drifter goes off on his own, Georgy is waylaid by three hooligans who assault him. The attack leaves Georgy mute and mad and he spends the rest of the film wandering aimlessly through a pitiless landscape.

The characters who populate My Joy are a murderer's row of ruffians, criminals, teenage prostitutes (an especially scary Olga Shuvalova), and sinister representatives of the government. Every government official in the film, from Soviet intelligence officers during the Great Patriotic war era to road traffic patrolmen in present day Russia, are portrayed as corrupt figures eager to prey on whoever falls into their clutches. Repeated requests to see one's papers become the film's harbingers of doom. If My Joy has a flaw, it is that its narrative is so scattered that it is hard to follow. Despite this caveat, I found the film to be an unflinching triumph.

Los Golfos

                          

Carlos Saura's Los Golfos (aka The Delinquents) is a corrosive and impressively assured first feature. Produced by Pere Portabella, the film debuted at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Its portrait of disaffected youth living in the seamy underbelly of Madrid did not meet the approval of Franco's censors. After extensive cuts, a truncated version had a cursory release in Spain in 1962. The uncut print has only recently been reassembled and is available on a handsome looking disc put out by Radiance Films.

The film centers on a group of six young urban miscreants who participate in petty crime to survive, sometimes with the help of their moll, Visi. The hooligans rob blind ladies, pilfer fruit, assault cab drivers, loot garages, and more. No mentors or father figures exist to steer the youth towards virtue, an unspoken legacy of the Spanish Civil War. Much of the film functions as a documentary about the more sordid side of Madrid. However, Saura never flattens the characterizations into a neorealist lump. Each of the six youths is given a vibrant and distinct personality. One of the youths, Juan, shows promise as a matador, so the others pledge to steal enough money in order to jump start his career. They succeed, though at a terrible cost, and the film concludes not with Juan's triumph, but with the most depressing and despairing bull fight ever captured on film; as opposed to all those jolly ones.

Saura combines bracing neorealism with the nihilistic despair of Buñuel's Los Olvidados. The images of slum life, like women gleaning what they can from the town dump, are worthy of that master. Saura's juxtapositions are continually inventive and provocative. Fado and flamenco are contrasted with a Latin dance band out of the 1930s or a hip jazz club where the necking clubgoers are digging Gerry Mulligan. Regardless of their diversions, this is a portrait of a lost generation.