Review

Friend Ivan Lapshin.

Ivan Lapshin (Andrei Voltnev) and Khanin (Andrei Mironov) in a scene from My

Soviet film release
product of glasnost

MY FRIEND IVAN LAPSHIN. A Sov-
€xport-Lenfilm production directed by
Alexei Gherman. At the Vancouver East
Cinema Aug. 25-31, 9:30 p.m.

Amidst the glasnost of the Soviet Union,

Mms-wnicty touched on'the troubled history”

of the Stalin period and were left in the can
for that reason, are showing up regularly at
Soviet movie houses and on Soviet televi-
S10n screens,

Among them is well-known director
Alexei Gherman’s film My Friend Ivan
Lapshin which sat on the shelf for several
years before it was shown on Soviet televi-
Sion and then released for the Cannes Film
Festival in 1986. Curiously, it would be hard
to construe its content as an overt criticism
of the Stalin period, although the gritty nat-
uralism of most of the scenes suggests an
uninviting society.

The film opens with the voice of a narra-
tor and the slow pan of the camera over the
mantel and bookcase of a modern-day
apartment. The voice — we see only his
8tandson, never. him — begins talking
about his friend Ivan Lapshin, adding that it
1S a “sad tale” that he remembers.

Film series opens

Running with My Friend Ivan Lapshin in
the the Vancouver. East Cinema’s Soviet
film séries by Soviet director Sergei Parad-
Janoy,
On Aug. 25, 28 and 30, at 7:30 p.m., the
Seles will feature his Shadow of Forgotten
Nncestors, a re-release of an older film,
billed as a Romeo and Juliet tale, set in the
Carpathian Mountains in the 19th century.
On Aug. 26 and 29, also at 7:30, The
ae of Pomegranates, Paradjanov’s 1969
1 about the 18th century Armenian poet
ayat Nova. Variety Magazine noted that
the film is “sharply surreal ... eye-catching,
£ven hypnotic and almost wholly obscure.”
Finally, on Aug. 28 and 31, at 7:30, is The
end of Suram, billed as a “fantastic
x €dieval spectacle based on the legend of
© Georgian people to construct a fortress
*8ainst invaders,”
Tickets for all shows are available just
Prior to show time at the VEC, 2290 Com-
Mercial Drive,

Shifting to black and white, the film cuts.

to a 1930s village where Lapshin is the
police chief. He lives in a dingy rooming
house, which is crowded with boarders,
most of whom are people he works with and
has generously invited to stay with him. The
housekeeper is*anold" women whose'sharp
tongue is only curbed by half-jesting threats
to arrest her and reveal her past.

There are others, too: fellow officer
Khanin, whose wife, Lika, has just died,
prompting him to attempt a half-hearted,
almost comical suicide; and Natasha, with
whom Lapshin falls in love, only to find that
she is in love with Khanin.

Lapshin’s police efforts centre on getting
the mysterious Solovyov gang, a notorious
group of black marketeers who have been
responsible for the deaths of several people.
Throughout the winter, the narrator tells us,
Lapshin tracks the gang’s leader, finally
confronting him after his friend Khanin has
been tricked and severely wounded.

But there is no real plot, as such. Gher-
man’s film is like a memory, recalling in
vignettes, fleeting images and recollections
of joyful and sad moments. And the cine-
matography is a visual echo of those memo-
ries, moving here into dark interiors and
elsewhere into soft, grainy images.

Throughout his 92 minutes of film, direc-
tor Gherman creates an unsettling mood.
Most of the faces of the people we encoun-
ter in the camera’s passage are 1mpassive,
almost expressionless. And although the
lives of Lapshin, Natasha and Khanin
create a living portrait, even they seem to go
about their days with stolid acceptance.

The recurring image is that of a tugboat
moving slowly upstream. At the end of the
film, as that image comes back in colour,
the narrator tells us that “much has changed
in our village — it has got much bigger.”

Is he telling us that something here —
that nothing really has changed since that
time? Perhaps. But there really is no pointed
message.

My Friend Ivan Lapshin should be seen
more as an example of how Soviets see their
own past, through the filter of their own
memories. And Gherman has done an
intriguing job of creating those images, with
a film that is often startlingly different from

rth American fare.
Be — Sean Griffin

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Pacific Tribune, August 21, 1989 « 7