(IVANOVA DETSTVO)
***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Nikolai Burlyayev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov, Stepan Krylov, Valentina Malyvina, and Irma Raush
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky & written by Vladimir Bogomolov, Mikhail Papava, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Andrei Konchalsky, from a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov
1962
95 min NR (should be R or PG13)
Do Russians have B movies? I ask because, despite its big splash at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, “My Name Is Ivan” looks, feels, and even sounds, for all the world, like the Andrei Tarkovsky version of a Roger Corman movie about WWII.
By “B movie,” I refer to cinema’s glory days of drive-ins and double features, when the first movie you’d see was the “A movie:” the prestige picture, the Technicolor musical, the Douglas Sirk melodrama. The serious movie with the Big Statements and the Serious Acting and the audience sniffling and pulling out its hankies. The second movie was the “B movie,” and those had different expectations. They were hard, fast, black-and-white, about the grunt’s eye view of war, about heists and getaways, about cigarettes and backstabbing dames, about flying saucers and axes chopping more than wood. (And, like “My Name is Ivan,” they often have more music than they need.) Producer Roger Corman got the likes of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola started with lurid ax-murder melodrama like “Dementia 13.” Even Kubrick made one of his earliest splashes with “Killer’s Kiss,” about a country-fried boxer in the big city, who gets mixed up with the wrong dame, and the tough who thinks he owns her. The grade “B” did not so much suggest quality as a simply a different style (and production cost).
Maybe the terminology in the USSR was different at the time, but in many ways “My Name is Ivan” fits that description. Tarkovsky went on to direct and co-write such beautiful and impenetrably artsy fare like “Andrei Roublev,” “Solaris,” and “The Sacrifice,” where plot and clear explanations are shoved aside to make room for long, thoughtful pauses while people stare out windows. But Tarkovsky’s 1962 film—one of his earliest—is about a spy bent on avenging his dead family, about soldiers on the front, about crossing a river in the moonlight, and about gunning down Nazis. That the vengeance-drunk spy is only twelve adds to the melodrama.
Based on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov, “My Name is Ivan” follows several days in young Ivan’s life, as he returns from a deadly mission and struggles with his superiors to go on another. As played by Nikolai Burlyayev, who played the bell-maker in “Andrei Roublev,” Ivan has a child’s impatience and temper, but a man’s worn face and determination. To say he is disturbed is an understatement; to say he is barreling toward some wacko-jacko degree of shellshock might be more accurate. He is much beloved by his captain (Valentin Zubkov) and his corporal (Stepan Krylov), but more wary of a new lieutenant (Yevgeni Zharikov), whose face is cleaner and younger than his own. Ivan’s time at the front is intercut with dream recollections of his past that are at once wistful, lyrical, and horrifying. Young Burlyayev shows his chops by playing this Ivan of days gone by as an almost completely different character: innocent, sweet, smaller. We see him running in the woods, at a well, on an apple cart. Present are his mother or sister, for whom the dreams always end badly.
Because this is Tarkovsky, whose storytelling strategy is always at best oblique, the specifics of Ivan’s mission are never made quite clear. We’re treated to long tangents that seem to have nothing to do with Ivan, some about how two of the officers flirt with the same nurse, some having to do with Ivan’s attempts to run away, and some following hallucinations of Soviet prisoners executed in what is now the lieutenant’s bunker. The movie is packed with imagery that Tarkovsky would go on to use again and again. We look down on large, sweeping landscapes, but never quite see a horizon. Trees and grass are gazed upon with the utmost reverence and awe. Russian Orthodox iconography is blasted and damaged by the whims of man, yet always survives. Water trickles, pools, forms ripples, and becomes a mirror. Time is taken to watch a horse graze on fallen apples. We spend much of the movie in the same swamps and river, where cinematographer Vadim Yusov, who photographed both “Solaris” and “Andrei Roublev,” has lovingly captured the water and the sky.
This contemplative pacing is the way of all of Tarkovsky’s movies, to present us with haunting images, to give us time to ponder them, and not so much have to deal with a story. “My Name is Ivan” is perhaps his most accessible film, because there is a story, and one whose war elements are familiar. We can follow his train of imagery more easily when we know we can find our way back.
And what great images they are: the decaying fighter plane lodged face down in the shore for eternity, the old man being careful to lock the door of a bombed house with no walls. The flares going up over the inky river, the dead spies hung out to dry. The once-fresh face of the lieutenant scarred over. The frightened soldiers ducking in the murk. The bombed-out buildings of the Third Reich, awash in useless paperwork and twisted swastikas. Tarkovsky’s camera style sometimes seems amateurish and not at all fluid, yet his willingness to hold on the same objects for so long, and from such-and-such an angle, gives his work imperceptible, intangible power. Does he have a specific goal with these images? War movies with big statements and big themes, like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Lawrence of Arabia,” are great and grand and important. But the B war movie often only makes the same point each time: this is war, and it sucks.
Finished November 22, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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