Mon ami Ivan Lapchine

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.

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.

I decided to watch this film after a poster said it was voted best Russian film. I had never heard of it before (I'm Russian and watch many many Russian films). This is now one of my favorite films. To me it is perfect in every way: acting, script, cinematography, music, feel. The film is mostly in black and white, thought it is book-ended by color scenes, and has color scenes multiple times in the middle of the film, always appropriately.

The story is narrated by a grown man who remembers his childhood with his father during Stalinist times. His father is a doctor i believe and they live in an apartment with Lapshin, the police detective, and Okroshkin, another detective i believe, and their landlady. In the middle of the story a play-writer friend comes to live with them while a acting group is in town to do a show. What is the film about, what is it's theme? It's not important, it's a deep film of memories and feeling. Cinematogrpahy-wise this film is genius. The beauty of the images and the story are breathtaking, every scene is a miracle. As i watched the film i wondered "how in the world have i never heard of this film"?? I thought the following reasons: too creative, to free of interpretations, too perfectly shot.. the communist powers must have hated this incredible, deep, film. This film does not make communism look bad or good, that's not at all it's theme I don't think.

If you take cinema seriously, you have to watch this film. 10/10, a perfect film.

They often say that German excessively darkens Stalin era. In reply I would mention that the movie was shot in my native city of Astrakhan in 1978 - on the 61st year of communist ruling. All those nightmare buildings are not stage constructions, those are buildings where people still live. All those freaks are not crowd scene actors - they are real population of the district close to Astrakhan jail. It would be very one-sided to bound the idea of the movies to critics of totalitarianism. For me it is one of the greatest attempts to answer question like -what makes people live? -why one can loose all the desires? -can you stand when everything around makes you vomit? The set of actors is great.

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.