MOVIE REVIEW : A SOVIET FILM SET IN THE STALINIST ERA

Once-banned Soviet director Alexei Gherman’s “My Friend Ivan Lapshin” (at the Fox International) is like a bitter aperitif--strange and hard to swallow. Its subtle political references to the Soviet Union of 50 years ago may leave you confused or even cross; they did me, at first. You could call its plot anecdotal or even irrelevant and no one would argue with you.

Yet the film is haunting; having seen it, I want to look again. And like a difficult piece of literature, its obliqueness is provoking; I want to learn how to understand it.

Withheld from release for almost three years, “Ivan Lapshin” begins as “a sad tale, a declaration of love” from a middle-aged writer in present-day Russia to the people he lived with as a 7-year-old boy in a small port town on the Volga in 1935. Moving back in time smoothly, we see them as he did.

They are Lapshin, the town’s police chief, a lean, interesting-looking career officer in the NKVD (precursor of the KGB); three of his men, including the narrator’s father; the boy himself and other householders in this rude, communal flat. (The subtitles never hint at the whereabouts of this 7-year-old’s mother.)

Shortly after Lapshin’s 40th birthday celebration, a journalist-friend, Khanin, despondent over his wife’s sudden death from diphtheria, moves in with them. The chaotic opening action, as the men prowl the flat restlessly, seems as wildly random as its camera angles, yet none of it is.

What narrative there is concerns a third-rate theatrical troupe that has come to town. In a diffident, almost schoolboy fashion, Lapshin develops a crush on Natasha, the most ardent and untalented of the two actresses. (He provides the troupe with almost-impossible-to-get firewood as a sign of his affection.) Though Natasha would deny it with her last crying/laughing breath, she is a quintessential Chekhov fascinator.

Lapshin’s glancing relationship with Natasha--inevitably in love with someone else, the married Khanin--occurs at the same time that Lapshin finally tracks down a long-sought murderer, the dangerous Solovyov, in a sort of grand, cinema verite police raid at the film’s end. (Shot in inky blacks and grays, it still has more authority than most criminal actions in films.)

Plot, most assuredly, is not the point of the film. Background is, and a swirling sense of recollection that is its dreamlike attraction. Gherman’s talent is in his method: the minute re-creation of this miserable period, in a camera that is never still, moving sensuously, sometimes through mists or haze. Characters sometimes glance into its lens, startled but accommodating its presence.

Gherman, with cinematographer Valery Fedosov, has shot this memory piece, based on a novel of his father’s, in tints like faded photographs, ochers and smoky grays. And not even his aesthetic is clear-cut; just when we decide that it is the present only which appears in color, a color sequence invades the past.

What American audiences must also struggle with is its possibly unfamiliar political background. There are no overt references to Stalin; only at the movie’s end, his portrait appears at the head of a trolley that rattles through town, pulling yet another of the town’s bands (“One for everybody here,” Natasha complains wildly), this one ominously militaristic. It is like a reference to another filmic trolley, the famous one at the end of “Slave of Love,” which carries its heroine uncertainly toward a post-revolutionary future.

Yet 1935 was a watershed year for the Soviets. After the forceful collectivization of the peasantry, Stalin’s Great Terror began in December of 1934, with the assassination of a Leningrad party secretary, Sergei Kirov. And we are told that it is from Leningrad that Lapshin has been transferred.

Gherman has explained in interviews that Lapshin “has unshakable faith in Stalin, but at night he weeps. There is something ominous in the air.” Papa Yuri Gherman’s novels were part of a huge outpouring of Soviet literature that attempted to make its long black leather-coated cops, the forerunners of the KGB, into dashing figures like the Canadian Mounties.

His 49-year-old film-maker-son, whose career, like that of Elem Klimov and Serge Paradjanov, has finally been released with the thaw of Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness), seems more concerned with the general misery of provincial life where shortages of almost everything--gasoline, sugar, firewood--are the order of the day.

If Lapshin is a romanticized figure, it is through the casting of Andrei Boltnev, a lanky Henry Fonda-esque actor, in the role. We see that Lapshin, although given to the nightmares and solitude of conscience, has enormously dangerous powers. He jokes almost off-handedly “about putting someone in his place.” That place is, increasingly, the work camp. We learn that the plain, stringy-haired prostitute whom Lapshin has obligingly provided for Natasha to study as a model for her role at the theater, has been sent off to one, after she has turned on Natasha like a spitting cat.

And near the theater, where earnest Soviet boy scouts proudly tend a science project where the fox and the chickens live together in harmony, there is disaster. “The predator’s instinct just flared up,” and the fox has eaten his pen mates. No wonder the idealistic Lapshin broods at night.

Because “My Friend Ivan Lapshin” is not an overtly anti-Stalinist portrait of one of his most early murderous eras, it may be seen in some quarters as a whitewash. It might seem that you don’t need corpses piling up like cordwood to sense the dangers and the disillusion that are beginning to seep into its characters’ very bones, like the mists and mysteries of this disturbing film.

‘MY FRIEND IVAN LAPSHIN’

An International Film Exchange presentation of a Heritage Entertainment film release; a Lenfilm production. Director Alexei Gherman. Screenplay Eduard Volodarsky, based on the short stories of Yuri Gherman. Camera Valery Fedosov. Music Arkady Ganulashvili. Production design Yuri Pugach. Cast Andrei Boltnev, Nina Ruslanova, Andrei Mironov.

Times-rated: Mature

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.