Another Soviet film from Russia in my theme week, this time a jolly musical about a housing project in Moscow. It screened within the aegis of the BFI’s big musical retrospective, as part of a smaller series of Russian musical films.
There’s a glorious new building going up, and a group of young people (and a few older ones) want to get in on a new apartment. That’s basically the plot of this jaunty and colourful Soviet musical, which because this is near the beginning of the craze for prefabricated high-density housing — and because there was indeed a drastic shortage of it — is actually pretty keen on the idea of social housing. Still, it pokes deserved fun at the party apparatchiks leveraging their influence to get a new pad, the guy literally knocking through a wall at one point into someone’s else flat in order to enlarge his own domain. It’s the young people who are the film’s focus though, as several couples start to form amongst them, in this new town being built from the ground up by good workers — like Lyusya, a crane operator worthy of getting her portrait hung up in a civic space, and Lida (Olga Zabotkina), an architect who tries her best to rebuff the irrepressible advances of Boris (Vladimir Vasilyev). There’s some nice camera setups and rather liberal use of back projection, but it does give it a daffy, fun quality. You can almost see the steps that get from this kind of thing to, say, Cloud-Paradise (1990) a few decades later, where the housing is rather shabby and the bickering far more caustic. Right now, it’s about the optimism.
CREDITS
Director Herbert Rappaport [as “Gerbert Rappaport”] Герберт Раппапорт; Writers Mikhail Chervinsky Михаил Червинский, Isaac Glikman Исаак Гликман, Vladimir Mass Владимир Масс; Cinematographer Anatoli Nazarov Анатолий Назаров; Starring Olga Zabotkina Ольга Заботкина, Vladimir Vasilyev Владимир Васильев; Length 92 minutes.
Seen at Ciné Lumière, London, Wednesday 8 January 2020.
filmcentric 