Letter Never Sent (Neotpravlennoye pismo)

LETTER NEVER SENT (Neotpravlennoye pismo)      B+                  

aka:  The Unmailed Letter 

Russia  (97 mi)  1960  d:  Mikhail Kalatozov

A rarely screened film, this is the third film collaboration between Kalatozov and his legendary cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, who was a front-line cameraman during WWII where he obviously learned the art of camera mobility from first hand experience literally decades before its time.  Urusevsky’s brilliant work in this film is notorious for having influenced several scenes in Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), most likely the speed of the camera as it whizzes through the Siberian forest remaining completely in focus capturing people running through natural environments.  Of note, on the night the film was screened, which began at 8 pm, there was a full lunar eclipse (2/20/08) NASA - Total Lunar Eclipse: February 20, 2008, reaching its peak for about one hour from 9 to 10 pm.  Conveniently, the Russian Cyrillic language was completely indecipherable by the student projectionists at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema who could not figure out how to do reel changes with so many ten-minute reels, causing them on two occasions to completely stop the film, turn on the lights, take a brief break and figure out how to organize the next segment before continuing.  This allowed the audience to run outside on a perfectly clear night in the frigid 5 degree winter temperatures to observe the natural phenomena happening in the sky.  For these incidents to have occurred during a film that revolves around man’s fragile relationship to the natural world around him felt like no accident, like the stars were all properly aligned.

In the spirit of pioneer exploration, dedicated to all the Soviet people, this film bears a similarity to Carroll Ballard’s NEVER CRY WOLF (1983), opening in the sky high above the clouds, a group of four Russian geologists are flown into a remote Siberian forest in search of what they believe will be an immense diamond vein.  Left on a riverbank with all their gear and equipment tossed in a heap, the camera is the viewpoint of the helicopter as it lifts into the sky and flies away, leaving them as tiny specks on the ground.  Tatyana Samojlova returns as Tanya, the only female of the group, making a large impression after she comes out of a swim with her nipples noticeably protruding.  This raises a certain amount of sexual tension as she is married to the feeblest man in the group, the intellectually inclined radio man Sabinine (Innokenti Smoktuvosky) who discovers Sergei (Yevgeni Urbansky), the man best acquainted with outdoor wilderness skills, may have his eye on her as well.  The fourth man appears to be the team leader and guide, the level-headed Andrei (Vasili Livanov).  Digging a series of holes in the ground, they may as well be digging their graves, as their search proves futile until Andrei convinces them to stay beyond their agreed upon duration, featuring a series of close up shots and a shirtless Sergei hoisting an ax, capturing a Dovzhenko-like rhythm of work until ultimately they find what they’re looking for.  They patriotically raise their glasses toasting the future pioneers of the Soviet space race, believing they have discovered a means to fund their mission.  

Despite several name actors, their influence is diminished by the rather sappy story, instead what can’t help capturing our attention is the physical appeal of that Urusevsky camera that never rests and some bold, over the top Russian music by Nikolai Kryukov, whose credits go back to the 30’s, actually helping revise musical scores in the late 40’s and 50’s for Eisenstein’s POTEMKIN (1925) and several early Pudovkin films.  The balance between the artistry is extremely effective as they do capture a Russian flavor that we see again in Tarkovsky’s Ivan's Childhood (1962), especially the scenes of men sloshing around the lakes and wetlands deep inside the Russian forests, featuring unforgettable images of birch trees and a recollection of music back home, but also that incredible train shot in Stalker (1979).  The optimism of the film is immediately upended when a huge forest fire breaks out and they need to make a desperate escape, discovering their boat is lost and their radio can’t transmit messages. Basically lost in what turns into a desolate Siberian wasteland, what follows is a lesson in survival as they are trapped inside the inferno of a burning forest that stretches for miles in every direction, eventually costing several of them their lives, ultimately running out of food and supplies, as their boots wear out, leaving them defenseless against the onset of ruthlessly brutal winter conditions that arrive in the blink of an eye, as fire suddenly turns to a river of ice.  The pace of the film slows to a crawl, resembling the monotonous pace of GERRY (2002), while also expressing the hopelessly unforgiving conditions in the finale of Masaki Kobayashi’s THE HUMAN CONDITION (1961), which this film may well have influenced.  The poetic beauty of the primeval wilderness belies its deadly capabilities, as humans occasionally are no match for the elements of nature, yet this film etches some of the more indelible images, reminders of how the earth once existed alone, immense, and untroubled by man’s presence.

The Way Back

THE WAY BACK                                                       B                     

USA  (133 mi)  2010  d:  Peter Weir

Peter Weir hasn’t made a film in 8 years, which is a staggering revelation considering the superb craftsmanship associated with his films, especially the breathtaking visualizations.  Perhaps he hasn’t been able to raise funds after the mixed reception of his last work, MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (2003), which played fast and loose with the historical facts, actually changing the storyline from the book upon which the movie was based in order to fit the gung-ho George W. Bush saber rattling war scenario that was taking place at that time.  This is a National Geographic funded project which allows him to film in some of the more remote areas of the globe, based on a 1955 book The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slawomir Rawicz, where he and several others escaped from a Siberian gulag in 1940 and in a year’s time walked 4000 miles from Siberia, finding and following Lake Baikal, trekking past the Tran Siberian railway to Outer Mongolia (also Communist), across the Gobi Desert, past the Great Wall of China (still Communist) into the Himalayan Mountains, initially finding refuge in Tibet, but continuing their trek into India where the British government at the time was staunchly against both the Nazi’s and the Russians, though the Russians were a war ally.  There has been some controversy about the book, as it was initially released as the author’s own story, but when it was revealed afterwards that he was released by the Russians under a 1942 amnesty agreement, Rawicz indicated it is actually the story of three Polish men who recounted their stories to him, one of whom is a former Polish soldier, Witold Glinski. 

Described as the first Hollywood film about the Soviet gulag, this overly detached and in the end unengaging film opens in Poland in 1940 when it was invaded to the West by Hitler and the Nazi’s, and from the East by Stalin and the Russians, opening with a Stalinest interrogation sending a Polish citizen to a Russian gulag for twenty years for making negative statements about Stalin.  The conditions there are decripit, with prisoners starving from lack of adequate food, housing prisoners with professional killers who run the inside of the prisons with smuggled weapons.  In reality, these were forced labor camps, something that was common in both Japan and China during this same time period, where the conditions were so brutal that escape seemed the only viable option.  In Siberia, however, the natural elements are so severe, and the distance so great, that chances of survival from an escape are rare to slim.  This film is reminiscent of the epic Japanese War Trilogy THE HUMAN CONDITION (1959-61), a three part drama by Masaki Kobayashi who documents similar conditions when defeated Japanese soldiers were simply abandoned and left on the mainland of Manchuria, China and had little hopes of ever finding their way back home, where the film follows the futile efforts of one soldier who escaped from a Russian gulag only to wander endlessly, starving for days on end without food, making his way alone through the vast emptiness of the barren landscape, eventually succumbing to weakness and starvation, left to die alone, frozen in the bleak emptiness of a desolate winter.  These exact same circumstances await the seven escapees, one of whom freezes to death the very first night. 

Featuring breathtaking cinematography by Russell Boyd, the humans are specks on the landscape as they initially make their way out of the Siberian forest before becoming engulfed in the immensity of the world around them, afraid to show themselves in Stalinest nations for fear they’d be turned back in to the authorities, so they instead have to creep around towns and hide where they could.  When they reach flat landscapes, it’s most treacherous, as it’s also harder to find food and water out in the open spaces.  One of the film’s failings is the inability to deal with the subject of starvation, which should have been everpresent throughout the journey, yet they somewhat nonchalantly find food all too easily.  Finding water in the desert was truly miraculous, but there was very little tension established about finding food.  Instead when people started to physically deteriorate, attention was paid to physical injuries or ailments, but no words spoken about food, which had to have been on their minds, perhaps even hallucinating about it.  Also, some of the arduous nature of their adventure is glossed over, as the seasons change from ferocious winter storms to spring pretty quickly.  The film also does little to delineate between the characters, where the audience never develops an emotional attachment to any of them, or understands why one is considered the navigator or leader, when he’s actually the youngest or newest prisoner, which makes little sense.  Who made him in charge?  In reality, it’s human nature for there to have been some dissension in the ranks over leadership, yet in this film there was no discussion whatsoever.  It was this lack of tension or screen intensity between the characters that left a feeling of vague disconnection with the audience, where the enormity of what was taking place rarely developed into an acute sense of awareness or personal triumph, never really becoming quite so intensely powerful as Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), which remains the definitive film on the subject, perhaps because the journey coincided with monumental social changes, so the epic adventure was superbly and dramatically placed in historical context.