Film review

  • Dear Comrades!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dorogie tovarishchi!

    Andrei Konchalovsky (2020)

    A year after Agnieszka Holland’s Mr Jones, here’s another recreation of another brutal episode in the history of the Soviet Union.  The atrocity in Holland’s film, witnessed by her young Welsh title character, was the Stalin-made Holodomor famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s.  In Dear Comrades! the octogenarian Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky dramatises the Novocherkassk massacre of June 1962, from the perspective of the protagonist, Lyudmila ‘Lyuda’ Syomina (an invented character, unlike Gareth Jones).  The Holodomor killed millions.  The death toll in Novocherkassk, when Soviet soldiers and KGB operatives opened fire on unarmed protesters, was twenty-six[1].  But Dear Comrades! is an altogether bigger film than Mr Jones.

    The action takes place in and around Novocherkassk over the course of four days, beginning on the eve of the shootings.  Konchalovsky (who wrote the screenplay with Elena Kiseleva) makes clear, in a succession of short scenes, that rising prices and diminishing food supplies are the talk of the town.  They’re the main topic of conversation between Lyuda (Julia Vysotskaya), a member of the City Committee, and her boss, Loginov (Vladislav Komarov), as she gets up from the bed they’ve been sharing.  (Loginov’s wife is due back home the following day but that’s the last we hear of her.  The  affair is quickly, and entirely, overtaken by events.)  Lyuda says she needs to get to the local store for provisions before they disappear.  On arrival there, she threads her way through a long queue, into a back room where a female store assistant produces a cache of various basic foods, along with special extras:  cigarettes for Lyuda’s elderly father; ‘chocolate curd bars’, her teenage daughter Svetka’s favourite.

    Lyuda doesn’t take this privileged treatment for granted.  She offers the woman in return one of two pairs of pantyhose she recently managed to acquire.  Her tone changes sharply, though, when her benefactor laments the economic situation.  It seems obvious enough that a staunch Communist like Lyuda doesn’t want the Central Committee’s name taken in vain by those less committed to the system yet the rebuke is still striking.  In Loginov’s bed, Lyuda herself criticises the cost of living and food shortages:  her lover reminds her that the current situation will lead to ‘higher living standards in the nearest future’.  Lyuda’s flip-flop is the first example of what becomes a recurring feature of Dear Comrades!, and a convincing feature of the political allegiances it describes.  People change their tune according to where they are, who they’re talking to.

    Along with milk and meat supplies, pay rates at the Novocherkassk Electromotive Building Factory (NEBF) have also declined while production quotas have increased.  The resulting industrial unrest is discussed at her own workplace and Lyuda is again hardline, disparaging the factory workers as ignorant criminals.  At home, she’s differently impatient with her father (Sergei Erlish), who glumly looks forward to death, and with her daughter (Yuliya Burova), for all manner of things.  Svetka is too questioning on political matters; besides, she won’t darn the holes in her socks or wear a bra, despite being well developed.  (How well developed is confirmed in an unnecessary full frontal of the girl as she emerges from behind a shower curtain.)  After an argument with her mother over the family’s evening meal, Svetka walks out of the apartment.  She hasn’t returned next morning when Lyuda leaves for work.  Within hours, the offices of the City Committee in the town square are under siege from protesters from the NEBF and elsewhere.  Armed forces arrive to disperse the demonstration.

    The shooting that follows is the kinetic centre of Dear Comrades! and a startling piece of cinema.  Konchalovsky and his editors, Sergei Taraskin and Karolina Maciejewska, do well to convey the chaos of the situation.  People are shot and fall down but it’s unclear where the bullets are coming from.  There’ll be arguments to come over who did the more damage – troops on the ground or KGB snipers on rooftops.  She and her work colleagues are ushered from their building to a place of safety but Lyuda is soon in the thick of the mayhem:  she’s anxiously looking for Svetka, who she thinks may have been among the protesters.  The previous day, Lyuda went to the hairdresser’s in the square.  As Konchalovsky’s camera re-enters the salon, a shot through the plate glass window kills the woman who runs the place.  Lyuda helps another woman, with a leg wound, into the hairdresser’s, and onto a chair by the window.  Another bullet kills this woman, too.  A radio in the salon plays light music throughout the sequence.

    The hint of satirical comedy in the title – and its exclamation mark – is reinforced by the script’s regular supply of apparatchik-speak.  The synergy between this and the horrifying events that unfold makes for a narrative as absurd as it is gripping.  Konchalovsky develops a tone that’s consistent but consistently disconcerting.  It’s remarkable, in view of the close-to-home subject matter, to see a Russian-made film manage this complex balancing act much more successfully than, for obvious example, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin.  Eager to toe the party line, Lyuda stands up in a meeting presided over by two Central Committee officers, sent to Novocherkassk on Kremlin orders; she urges an ‘extreme penalty’ for those inciting the protest.  Her intervention doesn’t go unnoticed.  Through Loginov, she’s asked by the Moscow visitors to put in writing the punitive measures she has in mind for troublemakers, one of whom may be the daughter that Lyuda is increasingly frantic to find.

    Prior to the arrival of Khrushchev’s emissaries, Basov (Dmitry Kostyaev), a high-ranking official from elsewhere in the region, has been dispatched to Novocherkassk to sort things out.  He cluelessly addresses the crowd of protesters and gets a rock thrown at him.  Fat, sweaty Basov is the closest that Dear Comrades! gets to a comedy character, thanks to a combination of his appearance and his ridiculous behaviour.  KGB man Viktor (Andrey Gusev) is a more ambiguous and intriguing creation.  He’s taken by surprise by the killings.  Viktor, who thought the soldiers would be firing dummy ammunition, seems not to have known in advance that KGB agents would also be involved.  The following day, he reports to a superior that the heat of the blood that splattered the asphalt in the town square has made it impossible to remove.  He doesn’t argue with the instruction from the other end of the phone line – to put down another layer of asphalt to cover the bloodstains.  Soon afterwards, Viktor arrives at Lyuda’s apartment with a search warrant.  He, for different reasons, is also looking for her daughter.

    The second half of Dear Comrades! largely comprises the hunt for Svetka, which Lyuda and Viktor carry out together.  He’s drawn to, and soon determined to help Lyuda rather than bring Svetka to book but he still makes use of his KGB credentials to assist the process.  A search for a missing child, in conjunction with Viktor’s shifting feelings, might seem to suggest the film turns into more conventional human drama yet it doesn’t.  Konchalovsky, rather, continues to illustrate the clash of Lyuda’s mother love and political loyalties, and shows Viktor’s personal and professional impulses operating in parallel.  Lyuda discovers some of the corpses from the massacre didn’t end up in the hospital morgue that she visited.  Instead, they were transported outside the city for disposal.  In the cemetery where the bodies were dumped in unmarked graves, the man responsible, in reply to Lyuda’s urgent questions, recalls that they included the body of a girl.  Unprompted, he also remembers there were holes in the toes of her socks.  Lyuda’s distraught reaction is memorable but so too is Viktor’s quiet response to her – that it’s right and proper for these dead people to be forgotten.  Even feeling sympathy for Lyuda, Viktor knows what view a man in his position should have of the matter, and is prepared to voice it.

    Konchalovsky’s visual and musical choices give Dear Comrades! a sense of unvarnished reality.    Andrey Naydenov’s monochrome cinematography, apt for a story set in the era of black-and-white television news, serves as a means of underlining that the core event of the film actually happened.  The images are contained in a square frame that buttresses the narrative’s matter-of-factness.  A fragment of the Russian national anthem is heard during the brief opening titles; a choir sings during the more extended closing ones.  In between, as well as the music coming from TVs or radios, a band tunes up outside the venue for a dance event, hurriedly arranged by the authorities to distract from the previous day’s bloodshed.  As they drive along in his car, Viktor, who belongs to a choir, and Lyuda sing the words of a patriotic song, with powerfully mixed feelings.  But Konchalovsky eschews the use of a dramatic score to interpret what’s happening on the screen or shape reactions to it.

    His expedition with Lyuda over, Viktor drops her outside her block.  She enters the apartment to learn from her father that her daughter has returned home unscathed.  Like the earlier quest to find the girl, this sounds like a familiar device – a last-minute twist that delivers an against-all-odds happy ending – but the effect is more complex:  the finale is rich in uncertainty and ambivalence.  Svetka is terrified of what’s going to happen to an agitator like her.  Viktor leaves the film wrongly assuming she’s dead.  Lyuda has experienced the ordeal of assuming the same – and the closing reunion is too brief to expunge the emotional weight of her accumulating despair over more than an hour of screen time.  The viewer is left full of how it felt that the mother had lost her daughter, even though it turns out she hasn’t.

    All the main actors are highly effective; lean, fair-haired Julia Vysotskaya is – as the story demands she should be – outstanding.  (Born in Novocherkassk in 1973, Vysotskaya is married to Andrei Konchalovsky, thirty-six years her senior.)  It’s plain to see why men are attracted to (the widowed?) Lyuda and her charisma, though continuously subjugated to the urgency of her predicament, is always part of the atmosphere.  But Vysotskaya realises especially well the collisions between Lyuda’s confident political spiel and her unbidden, disruptive displays of emotion.   People in Dear Comrades! tend to look back to better times.  A nurse in World War II, Lyuda regrets the passing of the Stalin regime while her father is nostalgic for his Cossack upbringing and youth.  (He has put on his old Cossack tunic when Viktor calls at the apartment.  ‘Grandpa’s just fooling around,’ Lyuda nervously assures their visitor.)  In contrast, the film’s closing words are about looking forward.  Clutching her weeping daughter, Lyuda insists, ‘We will do better’.  Is this a vow to improve her relationship with Svetka or a pious hope for the future of the USSR?   Perhaps it’s both.  At any rate, Konchalovsky’s film does a fine job of dramatising political versus personal conflicts and confusion.

    21 January 2021

    [1] This is the official figure.  According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, ‘Information from a variety of sources is more or less unanimous that some seventy or eighty people were killed’.

  • The Witness

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Solomon (2015)

    In the public mind, the name chiefly associated with a murder tends to be that of the killer rather than the victim.  The Kitty Genovese case is more singular.  It’s named for the twenty-eight-year-old woman raped and stabbed to death, in March 1964, close to the apartment block where she lived in Queens, New York City.  Yet ‘Kitty Genovese’, in both popular culture and an academic context, connotes, rather than an individual, a syndrome – the ‘bystander effect’, of which her killing quickly became an exemplar.   Six days after the murder, Winston Moseley, a local man, was arrested for another crime and, under police questioning, confessed to killing Genovese.  A few days later, an article in the New York Times claimed that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack taking place but that none came to the victim’s aid or even contacted the police.  Moseley was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death; three years later, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment[1].  The NYT piece defined the case’s larger significance for decades to come.

    Kitty Genovese was the eldest of five children in an Italian-American family.  James Solomon’s documentary The Witness follows one of her brothers, Bill, sixteen when his sister was killed, on a mission to investigate the circumstances of the murder.  What happened to Kitty had continued to attract attention in print and broadcast journalism, and inspire, as well as books on the case, fictional material:  as early as 1965, a Perry Mason TV episode dealt with the assault of a young woman whose screams for help were ignored by the residents of her apartment building.  Bill Genovese is exasperated by the consistent thrust of these formally various treatments:  the apathy issue dominates at the expense of Kitty the person (even at the expense of her killer’s motivation).   Bill and his sister, despite the age difference between them, were emotionally close.  He means to address the crime and its aftermath from the perspective of someone directly and deeply affected by them.  Bill is physically disabled, having lost both his legs in the war in Vietnam.  He attributes his readiness to fight there to a powerful resistance to bystanding.

    The first part of The Witness largely comprises Bill’s interviews with journalists involved in the seminal NYT article and the prosecuting attorney at Winston Moseley’s trial.  It gradually emerges that perhaps as few as two people witnessed any part of Moseley’s (two-stage) attack on Kitty.  Some of the larger number that turned a deaf ear rather than a blind eye thought they were hearing drunken lovers quarrelling.  Bill also talks with Michael Farrar, whose mother was Kitty’s friend and neighbour.  As a child in the early 1960s, Michael remembers several older residents of the apartment block whose arms were tattooed with what he came to realise were concentration camp numbers – whose reluctance to get involved, in other words, may have had a particular, understandable cause.  Bill’s findings still provoke the question:  what’s the critical mass of bystanders needed for their passivity to be shocking?  He nevertheless gathers persuasive evidence that the cachet of the New York Times, reinforced by the personal authority and reputation of its then editor, allowed inaccuracies in its account of the crime to go unchallenged,  It’s clear that the enduring received wisdom about the Kitty Genovese case is at best an oversimplification, at worst a travesty, of what really happened.

    About halfway through, the film changes tack.  It remains absorbing and you never doubt the strength of Bill Genovese’s commitment to his cause.  But what exactly is that cause?  The compulsion to break new ground in the case seems increasingly driven by a film-making rather than a truth-seeking imperative.  With Bill continuously in the foreground, James Solomon is conspicuous by his absence from what’s seen and heard on the screen.  You start to wonder, though, if Solomon isn’t exploiting the unfocused nature of Bill’s quest as a means of upping the narrative ante:  ‘How about we do this – or maybe that – to keep the momentum going?’  It may not be fair to distinguish too sharply the roles of the director and the film’s front man, who is also its executive producer, in this.  But regardless of who was the prime mover, two elements make the second half of The Witness uncomfortable in a different way from what’s gone before.

    The first is Bill’s attempts to meet with his sister’s killer.  Winston Moseley, although convicted of the murder of Kitty only, confessed to killing two other women.  Less than a year after his sentence was reduced, he escaped from prison.  He took refuge in an empty house for three days.  When its owners, a married couple, returned Moseley held them hostage, binding and gagging the husband and raping the wife.  He then stole their car and broke into another house, where he held a woman and her daughter hostage before surrendering to the police.  For these crimes, he received two additional fifteen-year sentences to run concurrently with his life sentence for Kitty’s murder.  In the 1970s, he studied successfully in prison for a sociology degree.  His applications for parole, which he was eligible to make from 1984 onwards, repeatedly failed[2].

    Despite showing little remorse for his crimes, Moseley came to see himself as both a reformed character and a victim.  This makes it especially hard to see what Bill expects to get out of an interview with him.  Waiting for a response to his request for one, Bill admits he’ll be partly disappointed, partly relieved if it’s declined, which it is.  This viewer was entirely relieved that Bill was spared what seemed bound to be a self-inflicted ordeal.  Instead, he meets Steven Moseley, one of the killer’s sons, and this is bad enough.  If Bill Genovese is excessively preoccupied with the case material, Steven Moseley (a Christian minister) is breathtakingly ignorant.  His father’s explanation of what happened, says Steven, is that he meant only to steal from Kitty:  it was her racist abuse that caused him to snap and to stab her.  When Bill points out that Annie Mae Johnson, the woman Winston Moseley killed previously, was African-American, it’s apparently news to Steven.  He then wants to know if Bill belongs to the Genovese mafia family.  His interlocutor shows remarkable self-control as he answers no.

    The second discomfiting element, which reflects less well on Bill, supplies the dramatic climax to The Witness.  It also climaxes one’s unease with the documentary’s dramatising tendencies.  Bill meets a young actress called Shannon Beeby.  She is to play Kitty in a partial reconstruction of the crime – to be more precise, her job is to replicate the volume and intensity of Kitty’s screams for help, in the actual location of the murder.  We see Bill putting up a notice on the entrance of the apartment block, indicating that space outside the building has been booked for a defined period of time.  Under cover of darkness, Shannon Beeby produces her horrifying screams.  There’s no reaction from the residents of the block.  What is this episode meant to show?  It can hardly be that the bystander effect is flourishing half a century on from the crime.   Some of the residents may well have read the notice Bill put up.  In any case, if they looked out of their apartment windows on hearing the screams, their minds would likely be put at ease when they saw a film crew below.

    From the late 1950s onwards, Kitty Genovese worked as a bartender and, in her final job, managed a bar in Queens.  She was on her way home from work, in the early hours of the morning, when Moseley attacked her.  The chief success of The Witness is in reanimating Kitty.  In August 1961, she was briefly arrested on bookmaking charges (and fined $50) after taking bets on horse races from bar patrons.  The well-known black-and-white photograph of Kitty turns out to be a mugshot taken during that episode.  It’s eclipsed in Solomon’s film by a wealth of other family photographs, and various video footage of Kitty, including her and her friends as high-school students.  She stands out as magnetically vivid.  The year 1954 was a pivotal one in her short life.  Her parents and siblings moved from Brooklyn, where Kitty was born and raised, to New Canaan, Connecticut.  She stayed in Brooklyn with grandparents then got married.  The marriage was annulled before the year was out.

    Kitty was gay.  Her former work colleagues with whom Bill Genovese talks have sharply differing views of whether her sexuality was common knowledge in her lifetime.  One of the most poignant of Bill’s interviews is with Kitty’s flatmate and lover, Mary Ann Zielonko.  The poignancy is partly to do with Mary Ann’s declining to be shown on camera:  her sound-only testimony concentrates the melancholy in her voice.  The saddest part of her recollections concerns a poodle called Andrew, which Kitty bought as a pet for Mary Ann by way of making up following a row.  After Kitty’s death, her father turned up at the apartment his daughter had shared with Mary Ann, demanding to take possession of the animal.  Bill is also upset when he hears this.  He remembers a dog briefly joining the Genovese household.  Its presence distressed his mother.  Andrew soon disappeared.

    The Netflix documentary series The Keepers (2017) – centred on the unsolved 1969 murder of Catherine Cesnik, a nun and teacher at a Catholic high school in Baltimore – had many strengths.  One was in showing that, to the former pupils of hers who had reignited interest in the case through a website and social media, the death of Sister Cathy had always been unfinished business, emotionally as well as criminally.  It couldn’t, however, dominate their lives while they were raising families and doing jobs.  Now they were retired and with new technologies available, they were making up for lost time.  Early on in The Witness, Bill Genovese tells someone he’s been working with ‘a film-maker for the last ten years’; some footage is indeed dated 2004.  Despite this, James Solomon doesn’t convey as clearly as he might whether the film is the culmination of a longer campaign on Bill’s part to rescue his sister from the confines of social psychology and criminology studies.  Has he, throughout his adult life, tried and failed to be heard?  Or did he start trying to make a difference only when, say, his children were grown up?

    According to Wikipedia, doubts about the accuracy of the original New York Times account were raised, in another piece in the newspaper, as long ago as 2004.  When Winston Moseley died in early 2016, a NYT piece by Robert D McFadden included the following:

    ‘While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety.  Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help.  … And afterward, two people did call the police.  A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived.  Ms Genovese died on the way to a hospital.’

    Even that summary contradicts the evidence of The Witness (which first screened at the New York Film Festival in the autumn of 2015 but wasn’t released until a few weeks after McFadden’s piece appeared).  The ’70-year-old woman’ must be Michael Farrar’s mother, Sophia – who was in her mid-thirties in 1964.  The elderly Sophia (who died in 2020, aged ninety-two) doesn’t appear until near the end of the film – in one of two concluding sequences designed to raise the spirits.  Sophia recalls Kitty’s last minutes, in her arms; Solomon also shows an almost celebratory family gathering, including three generations of the Genoveses.  The latter feels like a happy ending contrivance:  sibling tensions, sparked by Bill’s obsession and evident in an earlier sequence, have simply vanished.  In contrast, Sophia Farrar, telling Bill she hopes the dying Kitty realised she was being held and comforted by someone who loved her, comes across as sincere.  Yet the two sequences in combination resurrect one’s disquiet about the artful shaping of The Witness.  The last word is had by Bill, whose voiceover tells us he thinks Kitty ‘would want me to move on now’.  Once this film was in the can, perhaps he did.

    19 January 2021

    [1] According to Wikipedia, ‘the New York Court of Appeals found that Moseley should have been able to argue that he was medically insane at the sentencing hearing when the trial court found that he had been legally sane’.

    [2] ‘Moseley was denied parole an 18th time in November 2015, and died in prison on March 28, 2016, at the age of 81’ (Wikipedia).

     

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