The Asthenic Syndrome

This was another Russian movie that I saw at the film center. The director of the film is Kira Muratova, a woman filmmaker, whose name I had never heard of before. I just read a brief description of the movie in the booklet and found it interesting and so went ahead. Perhaps it was because I was totally unprepared for what was to come, I was almost swept away by the tidal waves of the brilliantly anarchic and, what do I say, nihilistic... absurdist... surrealistic... apocalyptic or just plain weird juxtaposition of it's images. The film hardly made any sense to me initially and it went weirder still as it progressed. However, there was something in the film that told me that it was a serious and indeed a great work of art and I mentally thanked the spirit of Gene Siskel and all the folks at the film center who had organized the retrospective. I could never have seen the film otherwise.

The film, which is around two and a half hours in length, is in two parts although the second part which is in colour is about thrice as long as the first one which is shot in Black and White. The film starts with a funeral scene of a middle-aged man who looks mysteriously like Stalin or at least he has a Stalinesque moustache. The wife of the departed man, who as we learn later is our protagonist, is shown to be apparently disconsolate about the whole thing. The whole wailing scene however, and it would apply to the whole film, has some unexplainable surrealist and absurdist quality which was quite baffling to me but after the film ended it fit in well with the entire structure and the tone of the film. The wailing scene in the meanwhile is cut and juxtaposed with other apparently unrelated scenes -- a young boy blowing soap bubbles, a mutilated doll, two men playing some nasty games with a hapless cat and most hilariously of all, three old, ridiculous, funny looking women chanting in unison as if some rote lesson -- "I believed when I was a girl that if everyone read Tolstoy, everyone would be kind and intelligent". I think the whole idea of the exercise must be what critics would call "taking stab at the idea of reaching the certainty of truth and meaning by juxtaposing images and symbols" and that might indeed be the case. Anyway, the old woman soon leaves the funeral and starts insulting her friends who try to show some sympathy to her. She picks up a fight with a stranger by asking him, out of the blue, "you wanna sleep with me? you beast". The stranger throws her in the dump and walks away leaving her hysterical. On her way home she picks up a drunk stranger and takes him to her home and asks him to undress but as he starts kissing her she again gets hysterical and orders him out. And yes I left the scene where she idly watches as she throws glasses from the table on to the ground one after the other. Now I am thinking how impossible an exercise it is to summarise this kind of movie. Anyway, after the first forty five or so minutes, the film abruptly changes gears and colours burst in and we realize that whatever we were watching earlier was actually a movie and not only that; as the presenter announces, the actress who played the part of the old woman is now present in person to answer all the questions. The audience however is least interested. One man complains to his wife that how boring and sad the film was and how when he comes to see a film he expects to be entertained. Some other guys get into a fight. A young boy clamours for an ice-cream and most ridiculously of all, a band of soldiers get up to leave after their leader commands them to do so in a military fashion. This last scene reminded me of a very similar scene in Bunuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. There it was the dinner party. The only man left in the audience is actually a guy who has dozed off into deep sleep, who as we learn later, gets a sleep attack anytime something important comes up. Now this guy becomes out protagonist and we follow him through similar absurdist and surrealist misadventures. It is fruitless to summarize the whole film.

The artistic form that the film most closely resembles is that of absurdist comedy of Beckett. It is as if Beckett had decided to forsake minimalism and enlarge his canvas with Shakespearean breadth while writing Waiting for Godot. However, there is one problem with Beckett comparison. The issues that the film raises are not metaphysical or existential. The film works in a post-Nietzscheian, post-existentialist world. It is as if Muratova were saying, yeah, we all now know God is dead, life is meaningless, order and purpose are comforting fictions, let's now move ahead. The issues that film raises are not metaphysical, they are political. What to do with the cacophony and the anarchy of voices that the flowering of democracy has apparently engendered? What does democracy mean in an age when people have become so indifferent and passive to their everyday reality and their very existence? And what indeed does democracy mean for people who suffer from "the asthenic syndrome", pointing perhaps to the weakening character and moral strength of the masses or perhaps just plain asthenia, that has crept deep into our soul, battle as we do, the banalities of everyday life? This reading fits in well once we learn that the film was made during the Glasnost period in Russia and that it was found so offensive that it was banned by even the liberal state. It seemed to me that, the symbolic death of Stalin in the beginning of the film was supposed to mean the death of order and harbinger of anarchy. But I am not sure if that was what Muratova actually wanted to say.