Un été prodigieux

Rural villagers arm in arm are making their way to the station where a local work heroine is returning from Moscow. Having received honorary awards, her homecoming is greeted with much excitement and proud celebration. Arriving also is an old friend, assigned as the collective farm's new accountant, his return will inevitably ignite the film's modest romantic intrigue. A bullock cart rolls along, the backdrop is one of vast productive pastures, perched on top of freshly cut straw a young kolkhoz worker sweetly sings of love...

Filmed in a pale pastel "Sovcolor" Barnet's romanticized film overflows with a cheerful crazy charm, the films many musical numbers create a stirring somewhat enchanting air of nostalgic naivety, an atmosphere that is timeless in appeal... On a homely couch two friends reunite, Piotr and Nazar play an accordion and sing a traditional folk tune under a portrait of Stalin, accompanying them is Nazar's elderly mother who views the touching scene with warmhearted affection... Under blue skies everyone is busy, beaming with smiles, filling bags of wheat that will be used to feed the country. As productivity records are being broken in the fields the film story concludes. Optimistic characteristics anticipate a bright and happy future in a land of abundance, where the spirit of mutual aid and humility motivate working selflessly for the common good.

Propaganda is a fiction like any other. Undeterred in the restrained late Stalin era, Boris Barnet masterly composed another of his impassioned works of cinematic art. "We must remember that a socialist state must give a socialist spirit to movie audiences". Barnet's film is an exuberant expression of Soviet "socialist realism"...exaltation of the peasant and working-class, the glorification of the collective, inspiring heroic destinies. With an idealized coordinated rhythm, workers, trucks, harvesters, livestock and tractors all seem to sing in harmonious unison, an anthem of collective progressive prosperity.

One of only seven features from Soviet Union cinema in 1951, it was French, film critic, director Jacques Rivette's first film review for Cahiers du Cinéma. Written in Feb. 1953, he praised Barnet and his film... "Truth is often silenced: with the exception of Eisenstein, Boris Barnet must be considered the best Soviet filmmaker... But who is Boris Barnet? No one will know, he murmured himself; surely a man of spirit, taste and heart; Isn't that enough? .."