Leningrad November

AFTER A TEN YEAR LONG STAY IN West Germany, Max returns to the Soviet Union to visit his deadly ill father in Leningrad. There he finds a friend in a man who calls himself Igor and he begins a love-affair with the deafmute Lena. Around Max' relationship to his father, Igor and Lena, losely held episodes give a many fasetted portrait of Leningrad and its inhabitants. In the eyes of the returning Max, the city is at once well-known and foreign. Lyrically saturated images and sophisticated editing contributes to making the film an expressive description of a changing city.
Comment:
THIRST FOR LIFE IN MELANCHOLY NOVEMBER. A greasyhaired charlatan, a deaf hedonistic girl and a half- Russian on a short visit. Their roads intersect one another's in a city - one place, one time. Leningrad, November.
It turns into a youthful Odysse of the city, seen from the eyes of three persons and one camera.
It's a city where giant paintings have been made in order to make high positioned men great. It's a city where the grey tones are lyrical, a city where the old appears to be lying on the threshold of death, the young hoping to leave for something else. The camera moves, sometimes alone through the city, follows the train, overlooks city squares, walks in dusk while people are resting or otherwise occupied.
It starts with a quartet that plays the background music, getting a prominent place on the screen, like in Prénom Carmen - it could be a friendly nod to Godard. What's natural fiction is losened up or extended. The episodic narrative, where people's moods are juxtaposed with one another's, could be said to lean towards the domestic Russian montage technique.
We meet three persons, each one with his/her language and they communicate without problems.
The sympathetic greasy-haired and Russian-speaking man, quickly eating a piece of chocolate, constantly curiously on his way somewhere. He eats as if he's just found a morsel of food, and as if he eats only when he discovers his hunger. The young man, speaking broken Russian, visiting from Germany, is introduced with his naked back in dark light where he peacefully overlooks a water from a window. Inside the room we can see the deaf girl naked, full of energy. Without a word the introduction of the characters have been done. Are these the important characters? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's supposed to seem like they just happen to be there at that moment. Like Godard's way of letting history itself and the narrative speak at least as much as the characters in them.
This film is safely balancing between tranquillity and tempo, slightly opening the door to these characters' private lives. It's partly a temporary meeting and a temporary infatuation and it's quite wonderful - in November. In Stockholm too.
WARDA KHALDI