ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Room’s Tonya, Gendelshtein’s Lermontov, Stepanova’s Composer Sergei Prokofiev. Barbican Centre, London, May 2004
Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted 13 Nov 2005

The World War Two propaganda movie: Americans die for their buddies, while British upper lips remain stiff under fire. But the lips we saw in Abram Room’s Tonya weren’t stiff at all. They were warm, full and tender, and they belonged to a pair of female telephonists. Their lingering kiss, as duty forced the separation of friends, was beautifully caught by the director, who framed it with silence. More than enough discomforting passion to keep this short tale of loyalty-to-the-grave away from starchy screens in 1942.

Yet, as John Riley suggested in his introduction to this British premiere showing, at the Barbican’s matchless Cinema 1, the Stalinist thought police may have taken an interest in Tonya for more depressing reasons. Room was Jewish, for a start, and his collaborators may or may not have committed ‘errors’. Riley seems to love the minutiae of movie history with a passion the rest of us reserve for ourselves, never mind our co-workers. The introduction kept the political and artistic milieu in focus, too: intellectual Arriflex. Riley’s enthusiasms and knowledge had led to the sourcing of usable prints from Russia , and these belated, Sunday-afternoon showings. The toy German tanks in Tonya were not very scary, but this 32-minute movie impressed the audience as a piece of genuinely compelling narrative. The direction seemed all too human; far too sensitive and sensuous for a wartime effort, and with a splash of Renoir. Room’s previous efforts had included frank studies of a ménage à trois, in Bed and Sofa from 1927, and the banned Severe Young Man of 1935. Clearly a major talent, a comprehensive re-investigation of this compassionate, humane artist seems long overdue.

Prokofiev’s music for Tonya – powerful, memorable, and sparingly used – came from a rapid production line that saw him rattle off four minor film projects, between the success of Alexander Nevsky and the start of the next Eisenstein project, Ivan Grozny. In the case of Lermontov, Prokofiev wanted a theme-and-variations approach, to match the highly formalised, sectional scenario – scripted by Paustovsky, later a Nobel nominee. The director wanted something more conventionally episodic on his soundtrack. Gendelshtein, who had worked with Pudovkin on The End of St Petersburg, and who had directed the Shostakovich-scored Love and Hate in 1935, would seem to have won this battle with the other great Soviet composer. Prokofiev’s score consists of the fairly well-known ‘Lermontov Waltz’ and a few other bits and pieces. The film’s later, dramatic high-points eschew musical accompaniment. Gendelshtein has a sure touch, but this is a period-piece twice over: the story of the great, doomed nineteenth-century poet, told in the style of Lang’s minor American work, or of much earlier examples of shadowy Expressionism. Yet this movie was a brave attempt to construct a worthy monument to cultural bravery, at a time of destruction and philistinism. It hasn’t worn well, but the audience applauded at the end. Just for a moment, in the dark together, our feelings were as undisguised as the shared affection of those loyal telephonists; then we all got jokey and critical in the freedom of the foyer.

In between these two studies in varying, monochrome contrast came the saturated Soviet colours of Stepanova’s party-line biopic of Prokofiev, assembled in 1961. Rostropovich, Oistrakh, Vishnevskaya and the rest helped convey the composer’s heartbreaking musical vision of paths not taken. This docu-drama mirrored the system that had both given it birth, and killed the film’s own subject before his time. Real feelings were hidden behind a weird facade of fantasy, mendacity, and nostalgia, as in all the afternoon’s movies. The music seemed the plainest of speech, among all the sham historical reconstructions and misrepresentations. The works chosen were not always the obvious ones, the director perhaps exercising the only sort of effective choice available to her: the F-minor Violin Sonata, Symphony-Concerto, and Chout, for example. They contradicted the glib ‘Ugly Duckling’ plot imposed on Prokofiev’s life-story by the film. In musical phrases as haunting as Tonya’s doomed face, humanity here stepped out of character, leapt from the reels, and went far beyond the political context. Your reviewer’s lip began to quiver a little, and he had to go outside in the sun to stiffen it once more. Not a Socialist swan in sight. On the contrary, the Soviet system was shown to have protected and given voice to the very notions it wished to suppress. From the reactions of a slightly bewildered audience, it seems we have yet to assimilate the implications and potency of Soviet art as it lives on, well beyond the grave of the USSR.

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