Two Films by Kira Muratova: Restless Moments

Valentina is indeed ordinary. In that opening scene, where we happen upon her as she mumbles under her breath—and who is not embarrassed to be caught in the act of talking to oneself?—her soliloquy is comically banal. “To wash [the dishes] or not to wash them? That is the question,” she ponders, a Lady Hamlet who is not contemplating some grand ontological dilemma but rather listlessly tracing a finger over the dirty crockery teetering in the sink. Valentina—one of those liberated Leonid Brezhnev–era women whose liberation in practical terms meant pursuing a profession in addition to managing the traditional domestic drudgery that men, their nominal equals, would never take on—is half-trying to compose a speech for an upcoming agriculture symposium, but she can’t get much further than her “Dear comrades” salutation. Everything about this intro is nothing-time; it’s the kind of scene that we’re supposed to imagine might happen in the excised stretches between the beats of a normal drama, but that surely no one would think to film, let alone to linger on, to luxuriate in, to occupy. And then the torpid rhythm is abruptly interrupted by a loud, dull twang, as a string on Maksim’s guitar, hung devotionally on the wall of the bedroom, spontaneously snaps.

This is the sort of eerie occurrence from which another filmmaker would extort heavy mystical significance. But to Muratova, whose films for all their otherworldliness exude a brisk disdain for the metaphysical or the spiritual, there is nothing supernatural about the little chain of coincidences that ensues. Sometimes guitar strings just snap. And sometimes, right after they snap, the doorbell rings and it is the country girl you hired as a housekeeper at your doorstep, who, unbeknownst to you—and, we assume, to her—is stuck on the same guy you are. The very same one who has serenaded each of you in the past, strumming that very same, recently sprained guitar.

Nadya’s introduction is in one of the drawn-out close-ups that Muratova’s regular cinematographer Gennady Karyuk loves so much, and that are bestowed on characters—many of them played by nonactors—seemingly at random, without much regard for their role in the story. Yet each time, it’s a revelation: Nadya’s youthful beauty, but also her sullen, wary impassivity during that first meeting; the gap-toothed smile and cute snub nose of her bawdy friend from her home village, Lubka (Lidiya Bazilskaya); the disgruntled faces of the tenants in a building where Valentina is struggling with water-supply logistics. And then there’s Valentina herself, her bright eyes getting hard when she’s challenged and soft when she’s around Maksim, and clouding over when she’s pining, or bored, or both.

Valentina is both pining and bored when she turns her head away from the apartment wall near which she has been dawdling and faces into a blinding light that cues a flashback to Maksim, flashbacks being the only way we ever see him. Nadya’s gaze, too, has the power to cause a swerve into her memories, as when she also turns to the camera while behind her a long, straight road comes slowly into focus, where she and Lubka are hitchhiking and hefting their suitcases on their journey to the city. The abstract expressivity of these transitions is striking, but their similarity also serves to create an equivalence between Valentina and Nadya, who, even without their unacknowledged connection, are from the start closer in spirit to each other than either is to Maksim. Two women, Muratova seems to be saying, even strangers, will always more fully understand each other than any woman can ever understand any man, even—perhaps especially—one she has loved for years.

The unknowability of men to women, and the way men chafe against bonds of female affection, are also fundamental themes in Muratova’s more expansive and even more dreamily experimental next film, The Long Farewell (1971). After the intimate domestic interiors of Brief Encounters, Muratova turns Karyuk’s camera toward wider vistas and more crowded public spaces: bustling post offices, alfresco luncheons, gala awards receptions followed by soigné garden parties with swing bands and cocktails under twinkling fairy lights. Yet her focus is if anything narrower, keener, and more acutely, unnervingly observant, sharp as the safety pin that her heroine, Yevgeniya (an astonishingly vulnerable and charming Zinaida Sharko), uses to separate her mascara-clotted eyelashes.

The relationship that is causing Yevgeniya such anxiety is not romantic but maternal, even if it is accessorized by the jealousies and purloined letters that more usually adorn tales of spurned lovers. Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky), Yevgeniya’s teenage son, has recently spent some time with his long-estranged father and is now secretly planning to move out of the large one-room apartment he has always shared with his doting mother, in order to live with Dad instead. To add to the injury, Yevgeniya first hears about this in an offhand way from a girl whom Sasha, suddenly interested in girls—in their hands and their necks and the ribbons that slide loose from their hair—has recently been seen kissing in a doorway.

This is an unusually compassionate exploration of the fears and frailties that can beset even the most confident and competent of middle-aged females (translator Yevgeniya, like Valentina in Brief Encounters, is a well-respected functionary in the local bureaucratic apparatus, just as Muratova’s own mother was in real life). But Yevgeniya is also sometimes ridiculous, as when she makes a tearful scene upon discovering a man sitting in her assigned seat at a recital, and elsewhere can be petty and petulant, as in the funny close-up of her sulking at the office, her pouting chin resting childishly on stacked, balled-up fists. “I’ve tried many actresses for this part,” Muratova told Sharko, according to an anecdote related by the actor herself in Vladimir Nepevny’s 2003 documentary Kira. “But I need an absurd woman, and now I’ve found you.”

Being absurd, Yevgeniya also talks to herself, indignantly arguing her case against some perceived slight from her boss with her reflection in a mirror. Sasha mumbles aloud when alone, too, lolling around their apartment, quoting half-remembered lines of literature and making up little rhymes. In both these early films, Muratova’s characters talk to themselves because, being women, or being adolescents still umbilically attached to their mothers, they know no one is listening. But Sasha, of course, is soon to matriculate into the world of men who can expect to be listened to. Sooner or later, he will abandon Yevgeniya and the womblike world they built together in that single room, one that put no walls between them, and that, with the refrigerator beside the sofa across from the beds separated by a wardrobe, has no divisions between the living and the eating and the dreaming areas.

Boundaries are further erased by Muratova’s energetic yet enigmatic bricolage: there are jump cuts and match cuts and cuts that make Yevgeniya a spectator at Sasha’s PE class, even though she is nowhere nearby in space or time. Mother and son’s codependency is so brilliantly evoked, in fact, that at times one suspects Yevgeniya is thinking Sasha into existence or Sasha is remembering his mother to life. There is always a shimmery remove from the immediacy of any unfolding action, as though it’s an observation or an anecdote about the moment, rather than the moment itself. Partly, that’s down to Muratova’s pioneeringly odd, seemingly post-synced use of ambient noise, music, and dialogue, an artificiality that divorces picture from sound and at times gives rise to the uncanny feeling that the actors are narrating their characters rather than performing them. Other times, there will fall a silence so sudden and absolute it’s like a hole in the soundtrack. And elsewhere, in group scenes like in Yevgeniya’s office with her chattering colleagues, or in Valentina’s trip to the hairdresser, Muratova uses stray lines of dialogue like shafts of light, sending them skittering through a scene to see what they will illuminate, a kind of echolocation for people suffering from vague but unshakable dislocation.

All of the distancing, reordering, and disrupting techniques that Muratova mischievously employs heighten the impact of those moments when she abandons them in favor of a straightforward representational realism. Perhaps the most beautiful scene in The Long Farewell is also its most atypical: a shot lasting more than three and a half minutes that observes in full a visually impaired stranger at the post office dictating a letter to Yevgeniya. Swiftly, efficiently, she transcribes his entreaties to his grown-up kids to come home for a visit, but also to enjoy their cheerful youth and not worry about their aging parents, and it is one of the film’s subtler heartbreaks that Yevgeniya doesn’t see the parallel between his words and her predicament. Locked in our own little hall-of-mirrors consciousnesses, we often can miss the opportunities for catharsis and comfort that someone else’s display of naked humanity can offer.

As also demonstrated by the unresolved question in Brief Encounters of whether the two women ever discover their shared romantic attachment, the glancing near-miss connection is a hallmark of Muratova’s approach, which is the opposite of standard dramatic form. She referred to these two films as “provincial melodramas” (a term that is only dismissive if you regard either of those words as derogatory), yet they are so antimelodramatic, so unsentimental and unsimplified, that they scarcely earn the name. Melodrama occurs in great swoops of emotion and fateful story arcs that bend toward tragedy or soar toward triumph. These films are structurally, thematically, and philosophically cyclical, observing people caged inside their behaviors despite life seething with possibilities all around them, life that manifests, semimiraculously, as a kind of flutter at the edge of the frame, too fast for the eye to catch but palpable as a breeze on your shoulder. This singular sensation can only be the result of the push-pull tension between the hemmed-in, sprung-trap circumstances of the characters’ lives and the wild, expressive freedom that Muratova dared to assume was hers to unleash in the description of them.

Muratova, who died in 2018 at the age of eighty-three, struggled to account for why the Soviet authorities, having barely allowed Brief Encounters to be seen, then suppressed The Long Farewell altogether. Muratova was forced into a filmmaking hiatus until 1978’s Getting to Know the Big Wide World—was ever a director so gifted in the art of the vaguely prophetic title?—and The Long Farewell was not released until the perestroika era. Her best guess as to why the film was banned was that its French New Wave–adjacent aesthetic was not to the censors’ tastes. But it is equally possible that the powers that be were responding with unplaceable alarm to that signature flutter, which makes her films so uncategorizably unlike anyone else’s, so intensely individual. Which is also maybe the reason she is only belatedly being granted grudging admission to the canon of “great filmmakers.” Not because she was ever anything else, but because the canon itself has been cast in the mold of the monolithic masterwork that encompasses a hermetic internal universe designed for total immersion, as impregnable to outside forces as an aquarium tunnel. And right from the off-kilter, midgear, half-in, half-out beginning of Brief Encounters, Muratova rejected that model. With the same airy insouciance with which she ignored accepted wisdom about playing to the audience and about cinema as a useful tool in the moral instruction of the masses, she instead followed her idiosyncratic yet somehow unerring instincts wherever they damn well led. Kira Muratova was ahead of her time. She is ahead of our time still. Perhaps one day we will catch up, but in the meantime we have the pleasure of giving chase.

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