Raba lyubvi

"Raba lyubvi" - called "Slave of Love" in English - portrays silent screen star Olga Voznesenskaya (Yelena Solovey) getting caught up in the 1917 revolution. She's trying to reconnect with a former lover, but the surrounding events complicate everything. What the movie's title shows is that Olga is not only a slave of love, but also of world events, of her career, and of her fans (I guess that even under communism - or whatever it was - people turn into celebrity fetishists!). As often happens in Soviet-era movies, there's a lot of exaggerated facial expressions. Director Nikita Mikhalkov appears as a waiter.

This movie performed a miracle - it captured a mood, an atmosphere so raw, full, that you are feeling the stuffy summer air, the slow dusty wind, candy-sweet smell of southern flowers in a hot small Krimean town. The fact that the revolution is coming closer makes it eary and subtly frightening, as if you know that there`s a needle in someone`s bouquet of camelias.

The acting is done in a way that you can`t believe it is not documentary, but film frames are like a picture frames, they airy and weightlessly capture fading scenes of decadent beauty. Then the violence comes and awakens the characters, they are silly,comical and immensely tragic at the same time.But even the shootings and some real documental footage don`t brake the atmosphiere, it only changes, darkens, like before the storm. All of it is symbolically captured in a scene in the garden, when the operator is trying to tell Olga that the old life is stale, unjust, senseless, the rush of wind runs over the park growing in strength along with the monologue. But she does not understand him, she thinks he`s just jealous and laughs in ignorance of the storms to come.

A fascinating film not only about the making of a silent film in Revolutionary Russia, but by extension, about the inability of humans to see beyond their primary interests, to ignore the wave of history until it all but sweeps over and engulfs them.

To a viewer accustomed to linear storytelling and sophisticated technique, this helter-skelter development of a love story between a somewhat scatterbrained actress and her quietly subversive cameraman may seem disjointed until the revolutionary movement intrudes and the violence of history intrudes into their country dream. Slave to Love is an odd little film, an immersion into the myths of another country, and while I wouldn't watch it twice, it's sincerity of purpose is evident.

Well-acted, nicely photographed, believable, this near-melodrama is remarkable for its comparatively realistic portrayal of character and personality on each side in the Russian Civil War (which immediately followed the second Russian Revolution, Lenin's Bolshevik take-over in the Autumn of 1917). See it, though, not so much for a surprising insight into crumbling Soviet ideology in 1976 (so early!) as for a very human, very touching love story.

Despite some nice photography and a mildly amusing if cartoonish nod to pre-soviet melodramatic Russian cinema, the good/bad PC politics sink this as soon as the message kicks in. Those wonderful (and so handsome!) Bolsheviks, always out to make the world a better place for the sick and the children. Neat that they courageously go forth to document White atrocities. Too bad they didn't have enough film stock to document what the Bolchies did, eh? as in the Ukraine in 33-34.