PIFF 2010: Installment VI Room and a Half
21 February 2010
Room and Half
dir. Andrey Khrzhanovsky
Russia
I might have missed this enchanting film about the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) had Judith not suggested it. That would have been a loss on several counts. Judith’s company is to be cherished under any circumstances, and she was the perfect person with whom to see this film, as she speaks Russian, has lived and traveled in Russia, has read Brodsky in Russian, and is a poet herself. So I dropped my troubled-loner persona and joined her for this 130-minute delight that passed in the blink of an eye. What could be more delightful than to hear her singing along quietly in Russian while the screen Brodsky sang what she later told me is one of her favorite Russian songs?
Room and a Half is the first feature film of director Andrey Khrzhanovsky, a 69-year-old animator, and it is quite a debut. He flawlessly employs actors, documentary footage, classical Russian music, still photos, recordings of Brodsky reading his work, and animation to tell Brodsky’s story in the form of a fictional memoir narrated by the poet as he returns by ship to Petersburg, the city of his youth, which he never in actuality saw again after running afoul of Soviet authorities and being exiled from the country in 1972.
I was dubious about the animation but found it deftly woven with the other elements into a marvelous tapestry of inspired sur-reality: cats and crows, flesh and blood and the animated variety alike, instruments of an orchestra floating through the air over the streets of Petersburg, 1960s young people conversing passionately about culture, literature, art, and politics, drinking and smoking, speculating about who will sleep with whom that night, a young boy watching his parents dance after his father returns home from the war in the East.
If my memory serves me well, Brodsky remarks while recalling his youth that for young people of that time cinema was the foremost art form and a crucial aspect of that is going into a dark room to watch it. While I am not inclined to put a particular art form, or a single genre of an art form, ahead of all the rest, cinema has been right up there for me from the time I discovered it as a freshman at the University of South Carolina in 1970-71, and I am unequivocally with Brodsky that going into a dark room to watch it is an essential aspect of the experience. It is wonderful to be able to watch old favorites and films we missed at the theater at home on the computer or DVD or DirectTV, but that is, to my mind, a lesser experience.
Room and a Half and Woman without Piano are as wonderful as anything I have seen in some time.
The Portland International Film Festival is winding down. It has been a good run for me, though I have no doubt I missed some outstanding films. I bagged the Hungarian film Chameleon Tuesday because I was feeling crummy, an unholy combination of allergies on the rampage and a miserable day at the office. Shameless, a Czech film about which I have heard and read mixed reviews, is on the calendar for Saturday to close this year’s festival for me. For the rest, I look forward to those films that will return to town for regular theater runs later in the year.
With festival’s end I return to other work, not that it was entirely abandoned over the past fortnight. Yesterday morning I astonished myself with some notes toward a poem. A minor fiction titled Until We Remember to Dream progresses slowly, the Brontë project is ongoing, and I am thinking now that Joseph Brodsky might be a good project to take up. Either that or I could get a life, buy a one-way ticket to Paris, and let the chips fall where they may.
More anon. Ciao.
[...] U.S. in 1976, four years after Brodsky came here in exile. Brodsky as he is portrayed in the film Room and a Half is a considerably more appealing character than the Brodsky of these tape-recorded interviews that [...]