La fièvre des échecs

I've seen a reasonable number of Russian films and it seems that all the Soviet films available in the US are extremely serious in nature--such as ANDREY RUBLYOV, WAR AND PEACE, POTEMKIN, IVAN THE TERRIBLE, THE CRANES ARE FLYING, SOLARIS and the like. So I was not expecting to find a funny film--and CHESS FEVER was hilarious! In fact, I'd place this silent comedy in the same category as a Keaton or Chaplin short--it's that funny.

The film begins with a geeky guy who absolutely loves chess. It's his wedding day, but he can't seem to focus on anything but chess. Seeing him in his crappy apartment with cats EVERYWHERE was pretty funny--you just have to see it to believe it. By the time he eventually makes it to his fiancée's home, hours have passed and she has had enough. She dumps the jerk and runs into a sympathetic man--who just happens to be the Soviet champion. However, he's no dummy--and he ISN'T interested in chess! Eventually, the boyfriend decides to give up chess forever--leading to a funny conclusion.

From the description above, it doesn't sound like a very funny film...but it is. There are so many cute little jokes and laughs that I couldn't help but laugh out loud several times--something I don't normally do when I watch a film. Overall, it's well written, acted and a lot of fun and it left me wondering if there are any more Russian films like this! If you know of any, let me know.

An absolute pippin of a short, all the more surprising when you think of the dour heavy-handedness that mars Pudovkin's most famous work. Just as delightful is the subject's ambiguity - a welcome break from the wearing, mathematical propaganda that is much of Soviet cinema.

The central ambiguity of the film is: does it celebrate conformity, or is it a satire on it? In favour of the former proposition is the fact that everyone's playing chess. Like the myth that all Dublin cab-drivers are learned Joyceans, the Soviet populace as a whole seem obsessed with the rigorously intellectual game of chess. The film opens with some dispiritingly authentic chess tournaments - yep, just grandmasters sitting at tables, playing chess, and people watching. Then the comedy begins. Its conflict is that a chess nut's fiancee loathes the game, and cannot escape from it wherever she turns. Her only chance of happiness is to conform to society's pleasure.

On the other hand, this pleasure is roundly mocked, and the insanity of the chess obsession leads the film from documentary realism, into fantasy, absurdity and the supernatural. The hero is a bonkers chess addict - his cap, scarf and socks are checkered, as is his cigarette case, while he has miniature chess boards, rule books and problem setters all over his body. His straightforward journey to his fiancee is constantly interrupted by chess-related obstacles, which are quite clearly seen to have a fetishistic power over him. This power extends to society as a whole: in one particularly piquant episode, a thief about to be nabbed by a policeman is saved because a stray chessboard falls his way; the hunter and hunted stop to play. Here the mixture of chess and chance are seen to have a disruptive effect on the smooth running of society.

I suppose whatever way you read it depends on how you view the game itself. In one way it calls for extraordinary intellectual and imaginative powers, the ability to think of alternatives, which runs contrary to the rigidities of a police state. However, chess itself is a rigid game, the board a prison with minutely defined rules. The pieces, like the citizens in a police state, are at their masters' bidding, forever running around in labyrinthine patterns. The film might be quite subversive.

What it certainly is is a hilarious treat, full of great visual gags and in-jokes, as well as a disturbingly logical Alice in Wonderland-like erosion of structures, and a heroine whose unhappiness is a strange melancholic malaise. There is an irreverent sense of jeu d'esprit almost entirely absent from Soviet cinema.

Of all the board games cinema's plots have revolved around, the most popular would be the game of chess. There are literally dozens of movies centered around chess preparation and competition as well as the character dramatics of those involved in the game. 1993's 'Searching for Bobby Fischer, 2016's 'Queen of Katwe,' and 2014 'Pawn Sacrifice" are some of the movie classics that come to mind.

The first movie structured around the game of chess is director Vsevolod Pudovkin's December 1925 short comedy "Chess Fever." The film looks at the Soviet Union's obsession with chess in a clever, humorous way. Using actual footage of the Moscow 1925 chess tournament showing the best of the country's chess players competing against one another in front of enormous crowds, "Chess Fever" focuses on one young man's obsession to the game. It's his misfortune he's engaged to a woman who hates chess. Named 'hero' in the film, Vladimir Fogel, portrays a nerdy character who sleeps, eats and drinks chess. He has chess hankies, chess ties, chess shirts; he plays chess in his kitten-infested apartment by himself.

The Nikolai Shpikovsky script makes a point that Fogel isn't the only one obsessed by the sport. Chess during the 1920s was a national passion everywhere in the Soviet Union, and especially in Moscow. Fogel's fiancee, called 'the heroine' (Anna Zemtsova) is so despondent about her lover's chess mania she buys some deadly medicine at the local drug store, where, coincidentally, the pharmacy's workers are playing chess in front of the counter. Outside, she unfolds the suicidal drug, only to discover its bottle is shaped like a chess piece (a rook). In a cameo appearance, World champion Jose Raul Capablanca, chess' real-life best player from 1921 to 1927, arrives to save the day. His secret: he says deep inside he also hates chess. Zemtsova is immediately attracted to him. Events lead to a surprise ending viewers would least expect to happen.

"Chess Fever" was the first movie directed by Pudovkin. He was involved in cinema from 1920 as a screenwriter, assistant director and art director for several films. He earned his first opportunity to create this short movie during a break from directing his first feature documentary, 'Mechanics of the Brain." He soon became one of cinema's most respected theorist on montage editing.

From afar, this is a simple film, as funny as Buster Keaton in his best day and at least half as inventive - but without the acrobatics. It is a funny vignette, about obsession and love subsumed into plan.

But there is more to it. Say you have noticed the subterranean waters that connect Franco-Russian cinema into one, and have perhaps noticed that Eisenstein accomodated fractures for the eye while Epstein for the mind; you will want to take a look at this, the most French film made by the Soviets at the time, decades before the French would actually make them.

The film is about chess. Two levels therein, as in film noir; down below the pawns, moved about according to some inscrutable whim, now and then facing extinction, and on the higher level gods pulling the strings, according plan and movement. This is generally about the game, now notice how the game becomes self-referential in-sight.

On the outer level there is a Grand Chess tournament, ostensibly real footage of national champions conniving each other over a chess board. Propped before an audience is a giant chess board, where the movements of the players are replicated for the audience to participate - everyone is looking at the screen transfixed, it's a primitive screen, cheering or keeping notes.

And the nested level inside; a story of love thwarted by a man's morbid obsession with chess. The woman confronts him about it. But it turns out, the world entire is chess. Chess as structured life, the Soviet dream. Even kids are playing it, policemen with those just arrested. The dismayed man walking out of his girlfriend's apartment, staggers onto a floor painted like a chessboard - he moves around as though pulled by strings.

The denouement takes place on the outer level, back in the tournament hall. The woman, who has newly discovered the wonders of chess, has shattered the juvenile love she clinged to for happiness; instead, she concedes to be part of the plan, the board where life is arranged into pattern and there to move and be moved. You may read what you want into this, but there is power behind the idea; love, that is to say emotional love, is not allowed final say here. Higher laws govern.

Self-reference; games of fiction; role-playing; and chess as the metaphor that weaves them together. This is what the French made a film culture of - it is certainly nothing like what we know of Pudovkin from his subsequent features. I'd like to think that people like Chris Marker, Jacques Rivette, Raoul Ruiz - who departed just a few days ago - would have adored this. I know I will.

This is a delightful little film. It is about ultimate addiction. The basic plot involves a young man (they had nerds back in 1925 in Russia), and his relationship with his fiancée. He lives and breathes chess (as do, it seems, most of the Russian people). He carries books, pamphlets, and little chess sets all over his person. He shows up three hours late for a meeting with his young lady, and while she is forgiving him, he has set up a board on a checkered handkerchief that he has put on the floor so he can kneel. As the young woman decides to kill herself, she can't get away from chess. It's there at every turn. Even the container of poison she buys looks like a chess piece. It is all ludicrous, but the comic timing and pratfalls are really cute.