Reseñas de la crítica

Less dazzling 20 years later, for reasons which aren't really its fault: (a) KHROUSTALIOV did the same thing on a more epic scale, and (b) the logistics entailed in the intricate long takes aren't so obviously stunning in our age of mobile cameras (you consciously have to remember to admire them).

Despite being mostly shot in black and white and sepia, the film is alive with an unruly, uncentered and unprocessed feel of communal activity. Alexsei German orchestrates this action with masterful long takes and tracking shots. But unlike the employment of this technique by Tarkovsky or Tarr, German doesn't so much connect images along a meditative stream with his more roughhewn, often handheld camerawork as clash them in an animated clatter of incongruity, something resembling collage art.

Reportedly revered by Russian critics, Lapshin doesn't look like any other film (natural light is trusted to a disarming degree), and the respect it affords its beleaguered characters is Renoirian, if Renoir were a New Wave modernist who'd endured almost a half-century of Soviet stress.

Loosely episodic, the film is remarkable in its resistance to linear narrative: dialogue is often drowned out by senseless chatter or the clanging of buckets; our view of important characters is frequently blocked by figures crossing the screen. In its cinematography, Ivan Lapshin consistently refuses to accept established priorities: as though every element of each shot must be allowed its meaning.

Despite a supple and original camera style, some powerful acting, and a refreshing absence of sentimentality, the loose, episodic structure makes for a certain dullness... Guerman has expressed some doubts that this film can be properly understood in the West, and it does pose difficulties for spectators who don't know much about the historical context. But anyone with a serious interest in Soviet cinema won't want to pass it up.

From [one] point of view the film is exciting because it dares to address the existence of the NKVD in the years immediately before the purges, an association that most Soviet citizens also make; but it is disturbing because it refuses to challenge received ideas and official ways of describing the role of the secret police in that period, or even to undermine some of the dominant clichés in Soviet cinema.

Gherman's methods are resolutely observational and low key, and his subject is the lull before the storm; the drama emerges as if by accident from a collage of resonant and deeply felt scenes from day-to-day life. Wonderfully vivid performances and amazingly original camerawork (mostly in elegantly faded monochrome) bring a vanished world to life with complete conviction.