‘Little Vera’--a Stark Look at Soviet Life

Want the real insider’s view of the Soviet Union today? Steel yourself and see “Little Vera.”

As this breakthrough Soviet film unreels its shockingly frank portrait of real life Over There, Americans may not know where to look first. Do they keep their eyes glued to its young star Natalya Negoda, a free-spirited bombshell, doing things that teen-agers have reportedly been doing for years--but doing them in an decidedly uninhibited fashion in a Soviet movie?

Or do they check out Vera’s startling milieu, a parade of disaffected young people and their ineffective parents who’ve taken to dope and alcohol, respectively, to dull their stifled, predictable lives?

If your money was on Negoda, you probably would be right. There are a few things the matter with “Little Vera,” a first feature by a 28-year-old director. There’s an awkwardness of camera work, and a screenplay whose earnest realspeak may remind you of “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” or other British kitchen-sink dramas of the early ‘60s, without their scalding power--or imagery. But there’s nothing whatever the matter with Negoda’s performance. Even standing sulkily still, checking out the world from behind her two-tone shades, Vera radiates energy. Cheeky, challenging, Vera is one of the most alive heroines in Soviet cinema.

“Little Vera’s” young director, Vasily Pichul, and his screenwriter-wife, Maria Khmelik, come to their subject from the inside. Pichul grew up in the cheerless seaport city in which he has set his film. Moscow-raised Khmelik reportedly got the idea for her screenplay on one of their visits to her in-laws, who still live in an apartment that could double for Vera’s three-room cracker box.

The city is the gray and unlovely industrial port of Zhdanov, whose waters are no less polluted than Cleveland’s and whose unwelcoming beaches are dotted with cement forms like huge tank traps. Soviets will understand the double reverberation of Zhdanov: It was named for Andrei Zhdanov, driving force behind Stalin’s purges.

Vera’s chances for the future depend on college, but her college acceptance letter, which doesn’t come during the course of the film, may never come. This is one of the few places where “Little Vera” has ties to classic Russian drama, and “letters from Moscow” which, invariably, never arrive. And if college entrance fails, the specter of a job in the telephone company is very real.

Until that college letter arrives, however, Vera drifts. Bright and sardonic, she runs with a group who meet in the gravel-pathed parks at night to listen to Russian rock ‘n’ roll, to deal dope and traffic in American currency.

Vera’s handsome, crumbling, truck-driver father now anesthetizes himself nightly with Beefeater’s gin or the omnipresent vodka. Her bewildered mother, supervisor in a fabric plant, comes off her shift at midnight to a sick, sodden husband and a mostly absent daughter. Vera’s brother, Victor, a doctor in Moscow, whom both parents depend upon to keep her in line, has a failing marriage and no respect for his parents.

Andrei, her high-school lover, is going off to the navy, and in one of the film’s funniest asides, his battle-ax mother loftily informs Vera, “You must come to meet the ships. . . . ‘Vera’ means faith.” Vera’s face at that bit of news is what used to be called a sketch. Andrei, with his expectations, his look of devotion, bores her beyond endurance.

On the other hand, everything about her new lover, Sergei, a blond college student with a fleeting resemblance to Mikhail Baryshnikov, fascinates her, particularly his cool. He couches his contempt visibly. Dressing for his first meeting with Vera’s parents, he rummages through his closet, discarding unironed shirts and jackets until he comes up with a pair of bright surfer’s jams and a T-shirt. And before the Sunday meal is half finished, the dinner Vera’s mother has labored over, he drags Vera away.

It’s a strained but civil encounter, but when Vera moves Sergei in with her family, on the pretext that she is pregnant by him, all show of politeness evaporates. They have a tiny apartment (in a drunken moment, Vera’s father accuses his wife of conceiving Vera only to get their third room) and the parents, in a balancing act not confined to the Soviet Union, must adjust to this arrogant young man living, unwed, with their only daughter not only under their noses but within earshot. The heat is turned up under this pressure-cooker family.

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Director Pichul and writer Khmelik have horrifyingly total recall for matters of decor and ambiance. These they balance with nice, off-handed scenes that come with late-detonating timing. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to miss the subplot about Vera’s best girlfriend, Lena, who has taken up with that older man she picks up in a cafe. He’s the one earnestly extolling the virtues of suttee in the Indian culture: “The women wanted it.” (This young actress, Alexandra Tabakova, is one of the film’s underpraised virtues.)

So far, 52 million Soviet citizens have stood in line for “Little Vera.” Reportedly they are upset but not unbelieving at its cheerles portrait of their lives. Actually, of all the political and social ills that “Little Vera” spills out so casually, the dissolution of family may well be the most wrenching. It’s the point at which curious Americans and clucking Soviets can identify most poignantly.

Throughout every upheaval, from wars and revolution, Russian solidarity has begun at home. Their cinema, from silent films to Andrei Tarkovsky, is full of unabashed tributes to this central core. In the 50-film Soviet retrospective last year in Toronto, Vasily Shukshin was its greatest discovery: Three of his glowing films from the 1970s were unabashed tributes to his peasant stock and to the traditional, rooted Russian family.

And so Pichul’s study of an unmanned, alcoholic father, a mother whose homemaking pleasures now take the form of endless, unwanted homemade preserves, a “successful” son with a shattered marriage, and an eventual explosion of domestic violence may be the most bitter truth of all.

And for all her studied sophistication, it’s the sight of her family caving in around her that cuts to the heart of “tough” little Vera.