Mi amigo Ivan Lapshin

Great cinematography, great directing, great acting. But this is not what makes a film great because they are mere ingredients. What makes this movie great is the humanity of its characters. It does not matter how good or bad is the system. Honest souls will always have something true to tell you about, to show you that even in the middle of the winter, the cold, the night, the lack of plenty there are human dramas involving all that humans can do. Love, crime, compassion, friendship, assistance... Not like a solemn hymn to joy of life, but as a simple story about some lives that are touched by others' and can touch the others' in return. Simply, humanly. Six people living in a flat show us, among other things, that what defines us is not the distance we put between us, but the closeness, the touch.

I just heard about German, I mean I knew something about his Krustaliov but I couldn't find it. Now, reading all this reviews about him, little in number but strong in appreciations as they are, I wanted to see his Ivan Lapshin. I just managed to see it with good quality, English subtitles on Youtube. I was amazed, German is in a league of his own, like Bela Tarr but more enjoyable. No wonder he made only six or something movies in his entire career. If all the other movies of him are of the same quality as this one I can understand the effort that he puts in such works of art. His long takes are so much better than,let's say, those artificial ones of Angelopoulos. He is so much more modest than a lot of filmmakers who wonder around at festivals hunting an award or two. He is pristine, alive, every shot of this movie contains something magical. Bravo!

A small-town man lives a normal homelife where he puts on appearances of respectability for his family and friends, but at work he's a brutal KGB enforcer. My Friend Ivan Lapshin is heavily reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror - half-memories told as a series of random disjointed vignets, in both black-&-white and in color, with very loose handheld camerawork lending it a naturalness easy to get lost in. Unfortunately, that's also a crutch. I couldn't help but keep comparing it to the Mirror the entire time I was watching the movie; albeit Ivan Lapshin's a very solid imitation, pretty damn good in its own right. Let's call this one a slightly overshadowed companion piece to Tarkovsky.

A recollection from a Russian childhood becomes, in director Alexei Gherman's memory, a rambling fantasia of events in a small provincial town during the 1930s. The film is virtually plot less but rich in incidental detail, and like any nostalgic memory is oblique and selective, and often shadowed with a profound sense of regret. Viewers unfamiliar with Russian habits and history may be hard pressed to follow the director's near-documentary recreation of local events (spiced with occasional arcane, Fellini-esquire symbolism). What passes for a plot is allowed to develop in an offhand, almost inconsequential manner: an awkward love triangle shared by the title character (a local secret policeman) with a traveling actress and a journalist friend; a manhunt for an elusive criminal, and so forth. It's as if the characters were too personal for Gherman to see them become bogged down in a simple romance or conventional police procedural drama.

Perhaps, this is Herman's best film, although although everyone are welcome to enjoy his other works even more. The film was "put on the shelf" i. E. temporarily banned in the USSR, then rehabilitated and received a state award, which really shows the rapid changes the Soviet Union was going through with every decade.

Unfortunately, the film is most often considered extremely one-sided by critics and viewers. Namely, as a kind of hyper-realistic live photography. Some even compare Hermann with Trier and Dogma. I think this is wrong, because Hermann was making movies about the past. History. But the point is not in the genre, but in the special attention to all peculiarities of the time in which the characters live.

But Herman's documentation would not have been true if he had not grasped the main thing - the ambivalence, the internal split of that time, which, however, did not go away. The film is not documentary, it is accurate in essence. A revived photograph and a story about the horrors of that time - cruelty, poverty, wretched collective life is mixed with amazing almost fabulous fantasy and beauty. Incredibly beautiful people, incredibly pure thoughts, the protagonist's sincere mythical fantasies about the Garden...

Herman did not create the deconstruction of the Soviet myth at all, as some critics think. He made a film about the duality of human nature and all time in general... where the terrible is closely intertwined with fabulous dreams... the film does not suffer from flat realism - Well, in what other movie have you seen such noble NKVDists as Lapshin? Such wonderful honest journalists as Khanin? The film still has a strong sense of romanticism to it.

Herman made a film primarily about his father. It was from Herman's point of view that he was a survivor of such hard times. However, the character of Herman's father does not play the pivotal role in the story, like Lapshin.

In this film, actors Boltnev and Ruslanova are more similar to Master and Margarita than to a provincial Soviet NKVDist and a provincial theatre actress. A very charming and memorable pair.

9 out of 10.