Three Stories by Kira Muratova

Kira Muratova, after Catherine Breillat , is the second woman who has completely shattered the naive image that I had of women filmmakers and artists. I always believed in the stereotype that women were sensitive creatures, more pre-occupied with the affaires de coeur and other feminine, soft if you will, issues of marriage, relationships and parties. Not to say that these subjects can not be subjects for artistic exploration. From Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, many women writers have turned these subjects into lasting works of art. Pride and Prejudice is about finding the right man, while Mrs. Dalloway is, more or less, about a shallow party and buying flowers, at least on the surface.

Anyway, whatever that is, I never imagined women to be capable of inflicting such nihilistic assaults on such feminine institutions like romance and family like Breillat does in her quasi-feminist, anti-romantic Romance and as Muratova does in her Three Stories. In fact Muratova goes even a few steps further in the film. She shows cold blooded murders in such clinical detail and with such black humour that it would give even Tarantino and his ilk an object lesson or two. The film, as the title suggests, contains three otherwise unrelated stories, linked only by the fact that they all feature a cold-blooded murder. In the first story, a man visits a boiler-room asking his friend, who is a poet of radical inclinations, to help him incinerate the body of his wife he just killed by slitting her throat. The beautiful, nude body along with the grisly slit throat is shown in full focus and the camera never flinches away even as the characters debate in the background, creating a sense of uneasiness and revolt even as the voyeur in the viewer wants to take a closer look at the nude body. The second story is about a nurse named Ophelia, who works as a nurse in the maternity ward and who says how Ophelia is her favourite literary character because she likes the way she died by drowning "innocently". Our Ophelia is obviously not that innocent. Apparently, more that nursing the patients, she is interested in murdering the women who abandon their babies after giving birth to them. In the course of film she also finds out her own mother, who had abandoned her and promptly dispatches her by, what else, drowning her. And as if all this mayhem was not enough, the final story is about a 7-8 year old, cute looking girl poisoning her grandfather in cold blood. She even tells the poor man how she and her mother will move into his apartment after he dies. In one scene the old man, in bouts of existentialist self-pity even tells his friend on phone, that he sympathises with people who want to see him dead completely unaware of what is going to come.

The film of course is quite unjust and excessive. However, I think the blunt cynicism is used more as a means to provoke the viewer and jolt him into consciousness than to honestly capture and represent the reality. And perhaps to show that women are not bad even when it comes to nihilistic violence! Takashi Miike, Kim Ki-Duk and Quentin Tarantino now have a female member in their club. And I think they should welcome her with all enthusiasm and respect.