Movie Reviews : Russian Comedy Strikes Right Chord in ‘Flute’

“A Forgotten Tune for the Flute” (AMC Century 14) is a post- glasnost Russian sex comedy, fascinating just as much for what it suggests about the Soviet Union’s current social and political transition as for its sprightly tale of love battling hypocrisy. In parts of the movie, writer-director Eldar Ryazanov, projects the oddball ecstasy of a man racing out into the sunlight and turning somersaults in the snow.

This exuberance gives the material a shine, a bite. It’s obvious why “Flute” was a big hit in the Soviet Union: It’s a salty piece of comic nose-thumbing. The film, set in modern Moscow, is audacious in a variety of ways. It ridicules the old government, shows some of its representatives as corrupt or stupid, blasts censorship and liberally laces its story with sex.

In this story of a Soviet entertainment bureaucrat who falls in love with a nurse he sees in an experimental production of Gogol’s “The Inspector General,” Ryazanov emphasizes everything unpleasant, stiff and spurious about the government officials. They are unimaginative career drudges from the Brezhnev era, trying maladroitly to cope with the new cultural openness. When they see avant-garde paintings or plays, works that suggest the artistic movements of the 1920s, these Stalinist fogies mutter and get shocked. It’s too modern for them.

Ryazanov, a popular Soviet comic director since his musical “Carnival Nights” in 1957, portrays these leaders as dumbbells and secretive snakes, just as Gogol did. His central character, Leonid (Leonid Filatov) is a phony bureaucrat with a bad heart, a one-time flutist who never plays any more, a social climber who married the daughter (Irina Kupchenko) of a bureaucrat above him. He is no different, really, from the sell-outs or lecherous executives in American romantic comedies, from Fred MacMurray in “The Apartment” to William Hurt in “The Accidental Tourist,” all those rich stiffs or walking corpses looking for a lively, flaky sex-bomb to pull them out of the dumps.

As Nurse Lida, his redeemer kook and life embracer, Tatyana Dogileva is a knockout. And, though she has descended from the same plucky worker-heroines Soviet films have given us often, she has a new set of post- perestroika antagonists: bureaucratic curs rather than counterrevolutionaries.

“Flute” shows the layers of Soviet bureaucracy the way some of the better Eastern European comedies have, like Zanussi’s “Contract”: as a silly parody of the class system in Western countries. Soviet comedies may have satirized the targets Ryazanov takes a bead on here--stuffy bureaucrats, chilly wives, doltish superiors--but, when they did, the stories were usually carefully set in the past, before the Revolution. Even so, the audience probably skipped past all that, responded to the period stories as if they were actually about the present.

Ryazanov is a an assured director with a breezy comic style. He is not too audacious: a lot of the attitudes here may be shared by Mikhail Gorbachev, who is said to be a big movie fan. But he keeps the film lively. The actors punch up their performances; the camera moves incessantly; Ryazanov has the pop comic movie-maker’s knack for peeling away layers of propriety.

There is one withering moment in “A Forgotten Tune for Flute” (Times-rated Mature for sex, nudity and adult content). Right after Lenny imagines, in a long dream, that he has given it all up, run off to join his lover, he is suddenly back in real life, at an office window, watching her walk away. His face looks ashy and horrible. He has let freedom get away from him, blown his chance. There he is, trapped in the gray room with Brezhnev’s old bunch.