Farewell

Elem Klimov is responsible for nearly all that we see in Proshchanie, which Ukrainian-born Larisa Shepitko did not live to complete. Based on Valentin Rasputin’s 1976 novel Proshchanie s Matyoroy, Klimov’s labor of love for his wife, who died along with crew members in a road accident, is a tremendous achievement—even though Klimov indulges his penchant for weirdness, caricature and cruelty, thereby disturbing the film’s delicate spiritual roots. Klimov felt he had sacrificed his style for Shepitko’s, but her superstititousness, which Shepitko shared with her elderly protagonist, Darya, created a bond with the material that her widower could not duplicate.

Matyoroy is a remote Siberian island village. The state has determined it must yield to progress; the island will be flooded for the sake of the construction of a hydro-electric dam, the villagers uprooted and relocated to impersonal urban apartments. Some, however, choose to stay behind.

The opening movement is phenomenal. At night the tree-cutters traverse the dark, moon-dappled water to reach the island. We do not see these strangely garbed invaders, only the water with its play of light; the angled camera fools us into thinking that the camera is directly—flat— overhead. The journey thus seems, visually, a climb, an ascendency—but isn’t. At dawn, when the invaders arrive, the perspective also makes the crude dock seem like something that the camera is scaling. These distortions provide commentary on the unnaturalness of the invaders’ mission. Their obscene laughter as they later tackle the job of felling an immense tree perhaps goes too far. Indeed, it is annoyingly convenient that Darya’s own son is charged with the responsibility of directing the crew that prepares the island for its “progressive” fate. —Dennis Grunes