Enfants de la cité

This is early in the short film-making career of Yevgeni Bauer, perhaps the greatest director of the 1910s, even when considering D.W. Griffith. Bauer quickly mastered the medium, with films such as "After Death" (1915) and "The Dying Swan" (1917). That, however, is not visible here. "Child of the Big City" isn't very different from other films of the time. The storytelling is rather traditional, although the content might seem especially despairing to one not familiar with such Russian preferences. The end is starkly to the point, but Bauer doesn't accomplish such in the rest of the film.

Bauer's direction isn't very advanced, although it remains impressive compared to many contemporaries. The camera is mostly stationary, with long takes. There are some exceptions in camera placement, such as the overhead angled shots. There are some moments of fine continuity editing, but Bauer seems to have mostly concentrated on filling scenes with props. I noticed two dolly shots, but the one of the dancer contains jump cuts. Additionally, the low-key lighting in one scene creates a silhouette of Vicktor.

What I found most interesting, however, were the shots through windows, doors, and archways, but especially through drapery. Bauer hung drapery in the bedroom of the most impressive scenes in "Twilight of a Woman's Soul" (1913). In "Child of the Big City", it's a reminder of the theatricality of the film. How the characters remove the curtains during some scenes seems artificial, as well.

(EDIT: 25 September 2019 review below):

My original comments written back in 2005 upon an initial viewing underestimated the value of this little film, "Child of the Big City," from master-filmmaker Yevgeni Bauer (indeed, since a bit more of his work has also become accessible from the last time I discovered him, a retrospective of his pictures for me is overdue). I've since seen the errors of my ways by returning to this in my quest to see a bunch of "Crime and Punishment" related films after reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel. I never realized this film and book had anything to do with each other until I came upon Rachel Morley's excellent essay, "'Crime Without Punishment'; Reworkings of Nineteenth-Century Russian Literary Sources in Evgenii Bauer's Child of the Big City," which is featured in the book, "Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of LIterature, 1900-2001: Screening the Word." "Child of the Big City" is hardly the most straightforward film adaptation of the text I've come upon in a list of two dozen movies; rather, it's akin to Woody Allen's semi-trilogy of Dostoevsky pictures (i.e. "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989), "Match Point" (2005) and "Irrational Man" (2015))), which are more of a rebuttal, or subversion, of their religious and reactionary literary source and a springboard for the filmmakers' own cinematic visions of morality.

This intertextual understanding helps clarify a film that spans years between scenes and within a relatively short runtime. To reiterate the film's connections to the novel as outlined by Morley: from the opening, Little Marya's mother dies of consumption--a narrative trope also employed by Dostoevsky for Sonya's stepmother. Likewise, the mother dies in the basement and "where the laundry was done," which is suggestive of the focus from the book on Sonya's stepmother washing the children's few clothes. Nine years later, Marya is a seamstress, like Sonya in the novel's epilogue. Whereas this was a redemptive act for Sonya, a former prostitute, the occupation is unfulfilling for Marya. A medium shot of her sitting in front of a window, with the cityscape seen in the background, as she turns to look longingly at it, underscores the contrast between the characters. Next, Marya meets Victor, a rich man who idolizes a supposedly "unspoilt creature" as exemplified by the sculptures of women adorning his residence. According to Morley, Victor is "a twentieth-century Moscow version of the nineteenth-century literary type of the naive and intense 'Petersburg dreamer,'" among which includes Dostoevsky's protagonist, Raskolnikov. Perhaps, he's also a bit like two of the suitors of Dunya, Raskolnikov's sister, who wished to marry her for her believed purity of one sort or another. From there, "Child of the Big City" takes a wild turn from Marya to her rechristening as Mary, an archetypal "new woman" or "vamp" who, as his mistress, brings about Victor's ruin--apparently, via excessive interior furnishings, dancing and partying and the forming of a love triangle. Mary has superimposed daydreams of her new lover, while Victor fantasizes about his first meeting Marya and is tormented by the thought of her with another man.

In other words, it turns out that Mary is no Sonya, but rather more of an unredeemed and unphilosophical Raskolnikov. The shot of her daydreaming features one of Victor's sculptures in the background to reinforce the dissonance between the aestheticized and the real woman. While there is no murderous crime as per the literary source, nor any feelings of guilt, punishment or ultimate regeneration, for that matter, Morley has made the striking point that Bauer makes something of a visual pun in reference to Raskolnikov's frequent use of the phrase "to step over" in the film's climactic scene. In Dostoevsky's moralistic tale of character redemption, Raskolnikov failed "to step over" the obstacle of a corpse he made of the pawnbroker to achieve his ideal of himself as extraordinary, but Bauer's subversion of this traditional literary moralism depicts otherwise for Mary in her hedonistic pursuits at the expense of Victor's, like Raskolnikov's and like Dostoevsky's, antiquated idealism.

"Child of the Big City" is more impressively produced and photographed than I gave it credit for originally, too. I rightly mentioned how some shots are partially covered by curtains and drapery--adding to the theatrical reflexivity already evident in the staged dance performances (plays-within-a-play). On top of this is a series of letter writing between Victor and Mary that reflects the picture's literary borrowings. As well, there's the aforementioned sculpture, the dancing and, better yet, some mirror shots--their reflections, similar to the double-exposure photography and dreams, being analogous to cinema: mise-en-abymes of images within images. In one room where Mary lounges about on a bear skin for a few scenes, there's a mirror in the corner, which at one point reflects Mary's reflection from another mirror that is obscured by the room's busy interior design. Add to this all the shots through windows, doorways and a staircase shot framed by an arch, as well as the consistent exploitation of depth of field, and "Child of the Big City" is an extraordinarily well-composed picture for 1914. There are also a couple dolly movements, overhead-angled shots, the memorable climactic low-angle insert close-up, and some backlit chiaroscuro effects added to the seemingly-diegetic lighting to set the mood for Victor's darker moments alone. Such fine framed compositions and mise-en-scene greatly relieves the largely tableau style typical of features back then, with sparse intercutting and intertitles in the days before the establishment of regular continuity editing. Quite impressive for a picture that's over 100 years old--that, itself, slyly subverts a 19th-century text towards cinematic modernity.

This Yevgeni Bauer drama is filled with piercing commentary on human nature. It is quite pessimistic in its views of the ways that we treat each other, yet for all that it is quite revealing and often convicting.

The story centers around a young woman, played believably by Yelena Smirnova, who grows up in poverty, only one day to make the acquaintance of a wealthy young man who takes a liking to her. The ways that he naively trusts and indulges her, and the ways that her own nature changes once she finds prosperity, are uncompromisingly depicted. In this as in a number of Bauer's features, it is the female character who is the strongest and most dominant, but the points that the story makes about human nature transcend applications that would be limited to one sex or the other.

The film also shows Bauer's restrained creativity, using devices such as double exposures to good effect. The final sequence efficiently brings the main themes together, and the final scene, for all that its symbolism is rather obvious, is a biting statement on ingratitude and materialism. It effectively closes out this somber, worthwhile feature about human nature.