SHY PEOPLE
With Jill Clayburgh, Barbara Hershey, Martha Plimpton, Merritt Butrick, John Philbin, and Mare Winningham.
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Reportedly because of his second marriage to a French translator in Moscow–Konchalovsky has the rare good fortune to be able to live and travel abroad without renouncing his Soviet citizenship, so he can’t be viewed as a melancholy exile like the late Andrei Tarkovsky. Nor can he be regarded as a director who invariably makes films about his homeland. Ironically, the qualities in Runaway Train and Shy People that seem to me most Russian their allegorical, mystical, poetic, pantheistic, and fairy-tale elements–are not especially evident in Asya’s Happiness, a more loosely constructed and neorealist sort of narrative filmed in black and white.
Diana quickly discovers that Ruth’s life pivots around two “primitive” myths about her own immediate family: that her dead husband, Joe, is still alive, watching and hearing everything the family does, and that her oldest son Mike (Merritt Butrick), who currently runs a seedy strip joint in the nearby town, is dead (or, more precisely, never lived–Ruth has scratched out every photograph of him). Meanwhile, Diana confronts Grace with a fact that she’s discovered by spying on her daughter in New York–that Grace is currently having an affair with Andre, a 40-year-old former boyfriend of her own who does a lot of drugs.
One doesn’t want to say too much more about a film that makes and provokes its own discoveries, but it is worth pointing out briefly that, like Runaway Train, Shy People creates some healthy confusion about the usual arbitrary distinctions Americans make between art and entertainment. As luck would have it, I saw both movies with “real” audiences rather than at private press screenings, and there was never a point during either when one felt the unnatural strain and hush that greets most “art movies.” The elements of allegory and poetry in Shy People, which make for a rather theatrical plot construction, lead to none of the self-consciousness that greets films by Ingmar Bergman; the audience was clearly with what Konchalovsky was doing from the beginning, proving in effect that what I’ve been describing as the “Russianness” of this movie, in no way interferes with its fidelity to the home truths found in a Louisiana swamp.
