LITTLE VERA
With Natalya Negoda, Andrei Sokolov, Ludmila Zaitzeva, and Yuri Nazarov.
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Until recently Moscow did not believe in tears or in soft-core sex scenes–or in hard-core depictions of ordinary workers’ lives in that reputedly classless society. But with glasnost in gear, director Vasily Pichul’s impertinent Little Vera opened rousingly last year; upwards of 50 million Soviet viewers gaped not only at the erotic antics on-screen but at a crucial and controversial Soviet cinematic achievement–an explicit expression of the cynicism and anguish rampant within a family that occupies sardine-can-sized living quarters in a provincial seaport town. In triumphant infiltrations into Western film festivals, this blunt film reaped awards in Montreal, Venice, and Chicago. Despite the “glasnost girl” hoopla (including a Playboy cover appearance for lead actress Natalya Negoda), Little Vera is decidedly not a prurient red version of I Am Curious (Yellow). The sex scenes are standard R-rated stuff, remarkable only because Soviet actors, who rarely bare all, are caught in the clinch. Among relatively recent Soviet releases here Little Vera may not be as stunningly well crafted as, say, Elem Klimov’s Come and See or as urgent and haunting as Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance, but it does muster a subtle dramatic force. It’s certainly a gritty and unapologetic portrayal of Soviet life, suffused with a disappointment and disaffection that is, well, a lot like what we can find here.
He moves from his tiny dorm room to Vera’s parents’ cramped flat–because of chronic housing shortages a common Soviet practice for married or engaged couples. There Sergei interferes most rudely with the neurotic and crippling games everyone plays: it could be a case study in family psychopathology straight out of R.D. Laing. When tending to her father during drinking binges Vera displays an unanticipated devotion and a craving for paternal approval. All this muted turmoil is captured with jittery hand-held camera, which creates (or reproduces) a sense of living precariously within a tiny, ill-lit, if very clean sewage pipe and waiting for someone up above to flush the linked toilet. Meanwhile, Vera and Sergei make love a lot in a thin-walled room. This is no recipe for peaceful coexistence, and the tale winds up with Vera rather unwittingly taking the parental side against Sergei. The film excels in capturing the choreography of mutual contempt (and attraction) at work in the family.
