Brief Encounters

Brief Encounters (Korotkie Vstreci, 1967), by Ukrainian director Kira Muratova, is a rare example of modernity in cinema in all of its dimensions. By bringing together a certain realism with experimental details, Muratova makes visible the use of the camera and cinematographic editing, in a criss-cross of flashbacks that disorient the narrative space-time and provide an explanation for the feature’s title. Indeed, in the film itself, Muratova — playing the lead female character, Valentina — deconstructs narrative conventions on admitting a certain strangeness: “When I watch a film or read a book, […] even when I’m suffering, everything is logical and correct, there is cause and effect, the beginning and the end.” This self-referential discourse, which also ends a veiled criticism of imperialist cinematic practices, is echoed by the voice of her lover, Maksim, played by the singer and composer Vladimir Vysotsky: “Cowboys, the first Men on Earth. Geologists, the second”, he states at one point.

A third “element” joins the couple — to use Goethe’s terminology from Elective Affinities (1809) — Nadya (Nina Ruslanova), the young housemaid who, in the meantime, has moved from the country to the city. But this love triangle isn’t really shown as such; rather, it is constructed separately from both women’s memories of the same man. Thus Maksim has a ghostly presence, which extends to certain indicative objects such as the guitar hanging on the wall of the house, which permeates both women’s recollections. By pure coincidence, Nadya is employed by Valya to do the housework (“I won’t wash the dishes! I won’t wash the dishes!”) and the two will then secretly — as revealed to us, the viewer — share the same obscure object of desire.

The pure present is conveyed, then, through the relationship between Valya and Nadya, whose homophony conceals the fundamental differences that separate them. The first embodies an apparently emancipated woman, urbane and well-heeled, with a job in the local administration (witness the countless references to her comrades, conferences, etc.); the second, a country girl displaced to the city and doing the cleaning (which, moreover, the former refuses to do). But the dialectic between country and city extends beyond the female characters, with Maksim wandering — such a nomad — between the city, where he meets Valya at the apartment, and the country, where he works as a geologist and meets Nadya on one of his expeditions. This geographical nomadism stands for, above all else, Maksim’s existential nomadism and radical individual liberalism (at one point, Valya calls him an idealist): “Why are you always thinking? […] Try not to think.” Always elusive, always unconcerned, Maksim never allows himself to be caught by bureaucratic moods — “Long live the sense of duty!” he says, with deep irony — nor by romantic commitments — “Everything is possible.” A man on the run who offers himself up to his own volatile passions and the pleasures of the flesh, as glimpsed in the shot in which Nadya stretches out in front of the camera and, from her contours, we catch the insinuation of a guitar.

Nature permeates these impressionistic images, from the long shot of the road running through crops to the still life appearing on top of a dining table at the end of the film. Also symbolically, there is an association between Valya and one of the vital elements — water — which features in one of her fundamental political and social concerns, and between Maksim and the earth, as a geologist searching for precious metals. Yet, like in Goethe, nature is first of all the nature of desire — romantic and erotic, but not only — which makes itself felt, like forces of attraction responding to the laws of physics and chemistry and breathing a kind of immorality. Perhaps because of this — and for its aesthetic distance from Soviet propaganda — this feature, which was Muratova’s debut solo film, was censored by the Soviet authorities for 20 years.

The secondary characters later perform the function of a choir, when they go to Valya to demand proper living conditions, or when Nadya’s friend refuses to be given orders, despite everything, or when they remember the victims of the Second World War and Hitler, with the old man in a hat who, in a kind of refrain, remembers the death of both of his children. The instances when he says, incisively, “The Germans killed her. […] The Germans killed him” resonate throughout the film like a murmur from the past, so that no one will forget, especially the viewer. Modern, like we said — though it is thanks to the smaller virtues of the film that Muratova stands tall: like the scene in which a young country girl runs through the street generously offering sunflower seeds to Valya, and in that moment we can’t help but think of the countless, vast fields of the Ukraine, today most probably destroyed.