MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Little Vera’: Snakes in the Workers’ Paradise

Little Vera, unhappy at last. And at first. And in between. But how else is a bored, nervy 18-year-old supposed to feel, living at home, nagged at every turn?

Sassy, sensual Vera is the second thing the camera lingers upon as the startling Soviet film “Little Vera” opens. (It’s at the Fine Arts.) The first shot is a long appraising pan along the depressing seaport city of Zhdanov, smoggy, industrial, grim. Across its polluted river is the cramped cement-blockhouse apartment Vera shares with her parents, indistinguishable from every other apartment building in their row.

Next, director Vasily Pichul shifts our attention to leggy Vera, pensively eating cherries on the apartment’s ratty balcony. She’s streaked her dark hair herself; when it’s combed out, teased and sprayed, the peroxided wisps look like feathers around her face, heightening the slightly predatory cast to her features.

Just out of high school, Vera is currently in limbo. Her truck driver father asks every single day--and at least twice at night, when the gin or vodka that are his evening release have dulled his memory--whether her admission to college has come through. Her mother, a foreman in a fabrics plant, spends all her time shrilling about the unwholesomeness of Vera’s friends. And when her parents get tired, they put Vera’s successful older brother Victor, who lives in Moscow, on the phone to read her the riot act.

A lot of good it does. Wearing fishnet stockings and a leather miniskirt, Vera goes to the public park with other aimless kids every night. When fights break out, the sight of patroling police with their German shepherds seems to deter no one.

It’s when one of these brawls turns into a full-scale riot that Vera meets Sergei, a college student whose cool is even greater than her own. Almost instantly they become lovers, giving audiences plenty of time to savor Vera’s casual attitude about semi-nudity, or whatever they care to savor during the couple’s private moments.

They are not private enough for Vera, who gets tired of Sergei’s classmates dropping in on them. By telling her parents the lie that she is pregnant, she moves Sergei under their roof, a living situation doomed from Meal One.

With this first, autobiographical feature, 28-year-old director Pichul’s strengths seem not to lie in construction or even in storytelling. The screenplay, by his wife Maria Khmelik, repeats scenes without particularly expanding on them. But there’s a power that comes from making what you know about, and Pichul grew up in Zhdanov; his parents live, even now, in an apartment that could double for Vera’s.

And Pichul is also on firm ground with his actors and downright canny about his casting. For the parents in this flagrantly controversial film, he buffered himself by using two veritable icons of Soviet cinema: handsome, silver-haired Yuri Nazarov as the powerful blue-collar father, pathetic during his nightly drunks, and Ludmila Zaitzeva as Vera’s worried, small-minded mother.

Then, of course, there is Vera, played by the ferociously assured newcomer Natalya Negoda, a 24-year-old actress with such feral intensity and compound-complex shifts of mood that we’re lulled into overlooking the fact that, as a film, “Little Vera” is raw about the knuckles. (It’s Times-rated Mature for sexual situations and nudity.)

It doesn’t have the elegant, theatrical style of Russian soul-baring that we’re used to from Nikita Mikhalkov (“Slave of Love,” “Unfinished Piece for a Player Piano”). On the other hand, it’s lightyears away from a sudsy weeper like the interminable “Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears.”

“Little Vera” has a few tragi-comic truths to get off its chest and, whether one lives in “the workers’ paradise” or far, far away from it, these truths are as frightening as an unexpected glimpse into hell.

A few bouncing moments of nudity aren’t “Little Vera’s” shockers, it’s the film’s gray-on-gray portrait of daily Soviet life, in boxes made out of ticky-tacky, bounded on four sides by boredom, alcoholism, pollution and repetition, and on the top and bottom by hopelessness and bureaucratic indifference. The family is in ruin; the prospects of the next generation are dismal. And there is no strength to cling to anywhere: God has been lost and the Party has proved bankrupt.

Only the hopelessly romantic can believe that Vera’s cheeky spirit will, somehow, prevail. If that were true, Vera might be the Soviet Alice Adams (Booth Tarkington’s Alice, not George Stevens’ with that awful uplift-finish), climbing the stairs to that dulling secretarial school with the same bravery that Vera may adopt in her job at the telephone exchange. The two young women have the same fire. But Alice at least had a world waiting for her when she finished the hated school. Vera has only the example of her parents, and that’s enough to quench the most intense fire.

‘LITTLE VERA’ An International Film Exchange, Ltd. release. Producers Gorky Film Studios. Director Vasily Pichul. Screenplay Maria Khmelik. Camera Yefim Reznikov. Editor Elena Zabolockaja. Art direction Vladimir Pasternak. Music Vladimir Matetsky. Sound P. Drosvev.

Times-rated: Mature.