KIRA MURATOVA

Kira Muratova’s The Aesthenic Syndrome

A few years ago at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, looking to kill some time, I wandered into a film by the Ukraine-based filmmaker Kira Muratova entitled Chekhov’s Motives (or, as the fest catalogue loosely translated it, Chekhov’s Motifs). When the film ended two hours later I staggered from the theater, utterly exasperated but profoundly transformed by the experience. This was immersive cinema of a kind I had not encountered before.

During the first half of the film — which is structured in two very long set pieces — a peasant woman and her son plead with the boy’s obstinate father over dinner to lend him money (for a new sweater, I think) for school. Over and over, the woman and son repeatedly berate the father, as a daughter and a baby look on. The family, seated “Last Supper”-style around a table, face the camera theatrically; the audience, in effect, fills the facing seat, silent witnesses to the plaintive nagging — for almost 45 minutes!

When the baby begins to nod out in real time at the table, finally falling asleep while struggling to keep its head upright, the audience howls with laughter, but the wife and son’s nagging don’t let up until the father is finally worn down and he loans the son money to buy the sweater.

Next, on his way to school, the young son hitches a ride from a man who offers to take him to town if he doesn’t mind making a quick pit stop at a relative’s wedding.

Quick pit stop? The second half of the film is the entire Russian Orthodox wedding, which goes on for so long — over an hour! — that, one by one, the wedding guests begin to fall asleep — mirroring much of the film’s audience, which struggles to remain awake.

In both halves of the film — loosely based on two Chekhov works, the play Tatiana Repina and the short story Difficult People — fascination gives way to exasperation and finally, tedium, but there are more than enough moments of absurdity and comic relief to keep you struggling to prop your head upright.

In the end, what finally impresses in Muratova’s uncompromising film is the sheer audacity of the filmmaker to so completley immerse an audience in the pedestrian world of her characters.

Later at the festival I ran into several film programmers, including Wanda Bershen, who, when I described the film, immediately said, “It sounds like Kira Muratova! You’ve never seen her work before? You have to see the The Aesthenic Syndrome,” acclaimed as one of the masterworks of contemporary cinema — and the only Soviet film banned under Mikhail Gorbachev!

I’ll finally get the chance to see The Aesthenic Syndrome next week, along with 7 other films by Muratova, as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s welcome retrospective, Take No Prisoners: The Bold Vision of Kira Muratova, which runs from February 25 – March 10.
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