MOVIE REVIEW : Long-Banned ‘Commissar’ Ranks Among Classic Epics

Alexander Askoldov’s “Commissar” (opening Friday at the AMC Century 14 and Beverly Center Cineplex) clearly belongs among the classics of the Russian cinema, yet it was banned for 20 years for daring to suggest that anti-Semitism exists in the U.S.S.R. This dazzling 1967 production surfaced unofficially at the 1987 Moscow Film Festival but has yet to be released in the Soviet Union. It is also Askoldov’s only film to date.

It’s hard to imagine anyone but a Russian being able to bring such sheer lyricism passion and epic scope to so intimate a tale. It is glorious not only in its portrayals of joy and despair, but in the breathtaking richness of cameraman Valeri Ginzberg’s beautifully modulated black-and-white images and composer Alfred Schnittke’s strikingly original score, which incorporates traditional Jewish folk songs. Its awesome hallucinatory sequences evoke an overpowering sense of terror and hysteria.

Adapted by Askoldov from Vasily Grossman’s “In the Town of Berdichev,” the film is deceptively sentimental and amusing. In the midst of the battle between the Reds and the Whites for the control of the Ukraine in 1922, a severe Amazonian commissar, Klavdia Vavilova (Nonna Mordukova), must at last leave the front to bear the child she had no time to abort.

She is sequestered in the tiny, crowded home of Yefim Magazanik (Rolan Bykov), a poor Jewish tinsmith who laments how hard it is “simply being a Jew” in an unkind world. He lives with his sweet and beautiful wife Mariya (Raisa Nedaskovskaya), their six small children and his elderly mother (Ludmila Volynskaya) in a picture-post card city. In the kindly atmosphere of the humble Magazanik home, the husky and hardened Klavdia discovers, to her surprise, the blossoming of maternal feelings. But the civil war draws ever closer.

It is amazing how much emotion and experience “Commissar” is able to express between its central symbols of life and death--the birth of Klavdia’s baby boy and the encroaching battle. During labor Klavdia flashes back to the extraordinary circumstances of her child’s conception; in a later sepia nightmare she envisions the Magazaniks marching off with all the other Jews, yellow stars on their lapels, to the death camps.

In “Commissar,” sound matches sight in richness: the rat-tat-tat of hammers boarding up the city to ward off attack, the crunch-and-scrape of a huge cannon rumbling over cobbles, the great whoosh of a cavalry charge. It is also a film of the touchingly simple gesture: a husband tenderly washing his wife’s feet and looking up at her, saying, “I love you.” And of the equally chilling incident: the little Magazanik boys playing war games in which they innocently shriek anti-Semitic slogans as they gang up on their sister.

Bykov, who appeared in Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Roublev” and who directed the 1983 “Scarecrow,” makes Yefim a mensch without turning him into a caricature. In playing the saintly Mariya, Nedaskovskaya makes her a flesh-and-blood woman, much as Olivia de Havilland did with Melanie in “Gone With the Wind.” But it’s the plain, massive Mordukova, embodying Mother Russia herself, who is astonishing as she gradually reveals the vulnerable and tender woman beneath Klavdia’s formidable warrior’s exterior. Every element meshes so effectively in “Commissar” (Times-rated Mature) that the effect seems truly flawless.