highly artificed melodramas
by
Douglas Messerli
Dimitri
Kirsanoff (director) Ménilmontant /
1926
Dimitri
Kirsanoff (director) Arrière-saison (Backward Season) / 1950
Estonian
born Dimitri Kirsanoff has been generally classified as an experimental
filmmaker, and, indeed, his films do present a great many images that remind
one of the Expressionist techniques and the later multiple and prismatic images
that one discovers in such filmmaking. Yet I might simply describe his as a
phenomenal cinematic artist who, like other great directors of the day, used original
and often previously unexplored techniques to enhance his tales.
Within
a matter of moments, Kirsanoff presents us with a scene where a young man is
waiting for a girl, who turns out to be the younger of the sisters (Kirsanoff’s
photogenic wife, Nadia Sibirskaia.. A second encounter leads to the handsome
young man luring her into his apartment, where gradually and carefully, he
attempts to seduce her, while she, allured, attempts nonetheless to refuse
while gradually being drawn further and further into his arms.
A cut
to her elder sister, lying alone and unable to sleep, in their bed, reveals
what we might have guessed. The younger of them, won over by her lover, has not
returned home. In the same lovely lane where he first waited for her, she now
awaits him, as we are made privy to his drunken wanderings and, eventually, his
abandonment of her. Brilliantly, the director makes her condition clear by
having her chalk up the weeks on the alley wall that have apparently passed
since her last period. Soon after, she accidentally witnesses her former lover
with another woman about to enter his apartment: it is her elder sister.
Obviously
pregnant, the young girl is soon revealed leaving the maternity ward with a
baby in her arms, no longer the young sophisticate, shown without makeup and
obvious scared.
While
the new mother still sits on the bench late into the night, the director takes
us to a bar frequented by prostitutes, one, almost like gypsy, with large
earrings and bobbed hair, finishing up other’s abandoned drinks. Suddenly the
elder sister appears, clearly also now a successful streetwalker, since she appears
somewhat stylishly in a fur coat. Nearby, the younger girl recognizes her
sister and approaches her, clearly offering up her baby since she clearly
cannot care for her. The elder takes the babe into her arms at the very moment
when the drunken ex-boyfriend appears at the doorway, impatient for the elder,
apparently, to join him. Suddenly the other gypsy-like prostitute appears,
evidently bitter about his rejection of her, and accosts him. Another man joins
in the assault and together they kill the man, dragging him away in a manner
that can only call up the first scene of this drama.
In
describing this plot, I realize the true beauty of this film absolutely
disappears in the naturalistic detail; one simply has to see it to comprehend
its remarkable power. I often disagree with the observations and judgments of
the powerful critic Pauline Kael, but, evidentially, she once revealed to Roger
Ebert that Ménilmontant was her favorite film, which almost makes the
cranky anti-sentimentalist human.
24 years later, in 1950, Kirsanoff was still
making stunningly beautiful and innovative films, as apparent in his Arrière-saison
(Backward Season; I prefer to call it Late Season), a far
less plotted work, and much more poetic in nature. Indeed, Backward Season is
a kind of Chekhovian tone-poem with Ibsen thematics.
A woman
is poised at the window staring into the woods outside her cottage where her
husband and others are chopping down birch trees. He is, obviously, a
woodcutter, who spends his day destroying the beautiful landscape wherein this
couple lives. And his wife, quite obviously, is distressed, if nothing else,
isolated and lonely, just as the dog they have locked up in a small-wired cage,
who keeps circling in the pattern of a psychologically disturbed beast (I might
mention that in both films, Kirsanoff is remarkably able to demonstrate human
frustrations by observing the animals surrounding them).
A stew
simmers on the burner, and, slowly returning to her chores, brings out bread,
wine, and cutlery to serve her husband. He returns home for lunch, and she
serves him, hardly able to eat anything herself. He dons his coat, once again,
and leaves. She quickly washes the dishes,
and pulls out her already packed suitcase,
obviously about the leave. A written message attests to the boredom of her
life. She is sorry, she proclaims, but she is leaving for ever. She puts on her
coat, drags the suitcase to the door and sadly accessing the simple elements of
their life, exits, placing her key, as the couple apparently do routinely, into
the nearby flower pot.
The next
morning he returns to his forest of beautiful birches, slowly axing down other
tree. Some neighbors have gathered about the house, obviously having observed
the wife’s departure, but he hardly notices them, leaving the key in its usual
spot.
Soon
after, we observe the wife returning, suitcase in tow, to retrieve the key and
reenter the cottage. Like Ibsen’s Nora, perhaps, she had needed to leave, but
has had nowhere to go. This painfully silent film ends there. But the torture
she must endure is obviously just beginning, or, at least, about to be
continued. As in Bella Tarr’s more recent powerful tale of despair, The
Turin Horse, nothing in her world can possibly be altered. The window, the
trees and their falling, the stew, wine, and bread, the silence is all our
heroine might possibly experience in this idyll of a cottage in the woods.
But once
more, Kirsanoff’s film itself, despite its despairing figures, is so beautifully
realized in its images and quiet expressiveness that the audience might feel a
great illumination out of the stark emptiness of its character’s lives.
Los Angeles, July 10, 2015
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