Film Women: Aliens to Aristocrats

Russian filmmaker Ivan Dykhovichny is offering an intriguing new chapter in his continuing contemplation of Homo Sovieticus: a look at Soviet man's women.


Dykhovichny's recent film mosaic, "A Woman's Role," which will premiere Friday at the Cinema Center, is the fulfillment of a long-awaited project tracing the various images of women in Soviet cinema.


"A Woman's Role" features the darlings of Russian screen through the decades, beginning with the glamourous fin-de-si?cle diva Vera Kholodnaya, whose lyrical performances gave to saccharine prerevolutionary melodramas a peculiar, bitter taste of perishing beauty.


The Revolution brought a cruder touch. In "The Young Lady and the Hooligan" (1918), for instance, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky is cast as a lawbreaking pariah in love with a young teacher in an evening school for workers.


The stylish and sad science fiction movie "Aelita" (1924) strikes a balance between love and political ideals. It centers on the eccentric queen of Mars (Yulia Sontseva, in costumes designed by Alexandra Ekster), and an engineer in the half-starving Moscow of the 1920s who designs a spacecraft and flies to Mars. The scene shifts back and forth from Earth to Mars, where a Bolshevik engineer is seeking to establish a Soviet republic for Martians.


The 1930s are represented by the "road to glory" myths of the period: "Bright Road," featuring the blonde idol of comedy Lyubov Orlova, transposes the Cinderella story to a textile town near Moscow, where Tanya, a peasant-turned-weaver, can handle 240 looms at once. The prince and the glass slipper are supplanted by the sparkle of a star-worker's award: Tanya is invited to the Kremlin to receive the Order of Lenin.


Dykhovichny spends less time examining the image of contemporary woman, although he offers glimpses of it with fragments from Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece "Mirror," starring Margarita Terekhova.


"A Woman's Role" was made with the assistance of the Central Film Archive, known as Gosfilmofond, and France's Canal +.


Dykhovichny, a rising star in post-Soviet cinema, has his own personal reasons for exploring the period of totalitarianism. His father, Vladimir, was a playwright who was branded an "enemy of the people," imprisoned, and set free only after Stalin's death. Ivan, after a 10-year stint as an actor with the Taganka Theater, got a degree in film direction from the National Film School, where he studied with Andrei Tarkovsky.


Dykhovichny's 1986 short, "Test Pilot," and his 1989 docudrama, "Red Series," were hailed as accurate accounts of Stalinist Russia.


His recent "Moscow Parade" ("Prorva," in Russian), a parody of Stalinist kitsch, was acclaimed as a landmark of Russian cinema. It tells the story of a woman from an aristocratic family who marries an officer in Stalin's secret police. She loathes her abusive husband and the newly privileged men of his ilk who have exterminated her family, and ultimately she rebels by falling in love with a railroad porter.


"Many foreign filmgoers say that this drama shows men and women for the first time," Dykhovichny said at a recent press conference. "'Prorva' is about the humiliation of women and the oppression of men in our society."





"A Woman's Role" shows Friday at 7 P.M. in the Big Hall of the Cinema Center on Krasnaya Presnya, at 15 Druzhinnikovskaya. Director Ivan Dykhovichny will introduce his film, which is set to music, with little dialogue. Tickets are 4,000 rubles at the door. Tel. 205-9631. Nearest metro: Krasnopresnenskaya.