La piccola Vera

Please Note: This review mentions key moments in this film. Do not read if you have not seen the movie!

Vera, the protagonist in the film Little Vera, lives in a closed, cramped world. She is trying to escape, both emotionally and physically, but in the end is no closer to freedom. Most of the reviews I read brought up the recurrent theme of limited space in this movie. The family apartment represents Vera's closed world in the simplest sense. She has no room to move, no room to grow and no room to find herself. Everywhere she turns the finds herself face to face with her mother, father, brother or simply a wall.

However, the family apartment is only one way that the director maintains this constant feeling of confinement. Throughout the film, Vera is rarely shown at a distance. She is always in a small room, or sitting directly next to someone else, or being physically smothered by those around her (Andrei, Sergei, etc.). She is almost always in physical contact with another person. During the rare times that she truly is alone, such as when she is attempting suicide, the camera only zooms in closer. In this way, the lens replaces the walls and smothering humanity, itself becoming an object of confinement.

If visual effects of confinement aren't possible, then sound is used to heighten the sense of disparity. Most of the dialogue in Little Vera, with the exception of less intense moments when the music volume is increased, is shouted, yelled or screamed. Vera's family is constantly in conflict and even the most civil dinner eventually erupts into argument. I found the constant barrage of sound equally as suffocating as the repeated scenes within the tiny apartment, and twice as hard on the nerves. Unlike Vera, however, we could leave when it was all over.

It is hard not to feel sorry for Vera at the end of the movie, but is our sympathy justified? She returns, time and again, to the very apartment and situation that is slowly taking the life out of her. Can she really be considered a victim if she is bringing a lot of her misery upon herself?

This once notorious drama (at least in its own country) was hailed as a breakthrough when first released simply for daring to show modern Soviet life without the usual State-approved propaganda halo, in all its actual anti-bureaucratic grubbiness. But watching the film on this side of the erstwhile Iron Curtain only reinforces the notion that Soviet youth culture is thirty years behind the rest of the world: despite the often oppressive details it might be just another quaint teen delinquency relic from early 1960s Hollywood, dubbed into Russian and updated with casual sex and drug abuse. In other words, it's hardly a revelation to discover that Russian kids are just as misunderstood by adults as their American role models. But while the attitudes may look dated to Western audiences, it's at least an honest attempt to portray something of the boredom and defiant posturing of youth, in a country not exactly noted for addressing its generation gap.

Forget every spy movie you've ever seen - this is what life was like in the USSR, and still is in many places in Russia and the ex-Soviet countries. Vera dreams of life of leisure, as she imagines the West to be; her reality is very different, with a bitter mother, a violent father, and the ever-present alcohol. And her prospects for the future are not much better. She finds a man and they try to patch up a life together, but he is afflicted by the same environment, both socially and physically - the scenery in this movie is brilliant, sitting comfortably in the company of post-apocalyptic movies but obviously done with no special effects; they have just walked in and shot whatever happened to be in front of the camera.

Forget your stereotyped, cold Russians of spy movies. This is the Real Deal: people are passionate, vibrant, and present in a way you'll never see in a drama from the West.

In Russia, the ordinary teenager Vera (Natalya Negoda) lives a leisured life with her drunkard father and her simpleton mother, without working and waiting for the calling for a technical course of telephone operator. Her brother Victor (Aleksandr Negreba) lives in Moscow with the family of his own and occasionally visits his dysfunctional family and Vera, being always motive for arguing. When Vera meets the student of university Sergei (Andrei Sokolov), they fall in love for each other and decide to get married. Sergei moves to Vera's house, but lives in conflict with her father. This relationship leads the family to a tragedy.

I have just seen "Malenkaya Vera", and I liked a lot this deep family drama. I am not familiarized with the life style in the former URSS, but there are some unusual behaviors that I found very interesting. The first one, when Victor tells Vera that she was conceived not because her parents wanted to have her, but because they wanted to move to a larger apartment. Another one, when the family goes to the beach in a truck. Many difficulties of Vera's family and their friends, the repression in the park and other situations pictured in the movie are common in Third World countries. This low budget movie is very well-directed, and the story is very profound and real. The cast has great performances and the actress Natalya Negoda is very beautiful. In the cover of the Brazilian VHS, released by Sagres distributor, there is information that Natalya Negoda was the centerfold of Playboy magazine. I am not sure how precise are the subtitles in Portuguese, since many long sentences spoken in Russian are limited to short translation in few words. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Pequena Vera" ("The Little Vera")

It is difficult, today and in the US, to understand this movie. We have nothing, really, to compare it with. Here is an attempt at comparison: It is as if during the last years of Saddam's rule, a filmmaker in Iraq were somehow able to make a film, which, for the first time ever, showed life as it really was lived in that country. The life of ordinary young girl, with all the terror and the repression full blown. Then the film was exhibited freely in Iraq. If you could imagine that unlikely event, then you might have an idea of what went on with this film in the last few years of the Soviet Union. Prior to this film, Soviet cinema was highly censored. Soviet movies would only show an ideal life in the worker's paradise. Then suddenly this. The alcoholism, the random sex, the ugly wasteland that was the Soviet city, the choking pollution, the proletariat victimizing each other and themselves, the utter hopelessness - it is all there. People were stunned. Soviet women would often weep during the showings. Many would say that this is the story of their lives. It was a cultural earthquake the like of which filmmakers only dream of accomplishing. It undoubtedly hastened the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Reading the reviews here, I can see that few understand this film. One says it was groundbreaking because it contained real sex. To the Soviet viewers at the time, the sex was a minor event compared to fact that it portrayed reality for the first time in Soviet cinema.

Others compare it to current films such as "As Good as it Gets" Might as well compare Homer's Illiad to the latest John Grissam novel. They simply do not compare. This is not just a film, this is was a social document, and a transforming social force. It needs to be viewed that way or you will not understand the film.

Other reviewers see it as a film about a dysfunctional Russian family. One even says that it is difficult to feel sorry for Vera because she keeps coming back to her family. The point is that Vera and her family are symbols for all of Soviet life. There was nowhere else to go, because the family down the block and in the next town were the same. This was life in the Soviet Union for most people.

This is a film that can be viewed on many levels: as a drama it traces the landscape of despair, as a social document it shows the living conditions of the time, as a political document it shows the attitude of the people and many of the reasons for the break-up of the Soviet Union, and as a moral document it shows the evils of a dictatorship that is out of control, and the cruelties that victims will practice on each other.

Little Vera clearly shows the human toll that Socialism eventually takes on its victims, despite any good intentions that system may have. In doing so it helped end the Soviet regime thus contributing to one of the major changes in modern history. This film achieves what only a few films have ever accomplished. It is not only an stunning representation of history but it also become a force in that shaped history.