Review

Reviewed Work(s): Asthenic Syndrome (Astenicheskii Sindrom). by Kira Muratova

Review by: Jane A. Taubman
Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 802-803
Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Cambridge
University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500141
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 FILM REVIEWS

Asthenic Syndrome (Astenicheskii sindrom). Dir., Kira Muratova. Scenario; Sergei Popov,
A. Chernykh, Kira Muratova. Camera: V. Pankov. Odessa Film Studio, 1989.

Two cinematic milestones bracket the "glasnost"' era. Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance
marked its beginning; Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome, released in 1990, anticipated
its end. But while Repentance allowed its audience to blame "stalinists" for Russia's
predicament and, if they chose, to pass over the question of how the people allowed
them to gain such power, Asthenic Syndrome places the blame directly and uncomfort-
ably on the audience itself. In its images, its language, its message and even its two-
and-one-half-hour length, the film aggressively assaults its audience in a desperate
attempt to rouse them from moral torpor. In an early scene, a cat is tormented; near
the end, there is a long, painful shot of abandoned dogs about to be put to sleep. In
between, a mentally retarded man is cruelly teased by two young girls. Watching these
scenes is not pleasant, as Muratova emphasizes in a black-and-white intertitle after the
shot of the dogs: "People don't like to look at this. People don't like to hear about
this. This shouldn't have any relation to conversations about good and evil." The tone
is Tolstoian; and the viewer suddenly understands why the film had begun with three
old women reciting, not quite in unison, "In my childhood, in my early youth, I
thought that people had only to read Leo Tolstoi carefully and everyone would un-
derstand everything and everybody would become kind and intelligent." Muratova is
a modern disciple of that archetypal Russian moralist, but to reach a late twentieth
century audience she chooses surrealism rather than realism.
The medical syndrome from which the film borrows its title is a condition of
absolute physical and psychological exhaustion, a metaphor for Soviet society in its
final years. The hero, Nikolai, a secondary school teacher (Sergei Popov), keeps falling
asleep at inappropriate moments such as a parent-teacher meeting. But his narcolepsy
is a psychological defense against a world whose moral degradation has become un-
bearable. Though the horrors with which Muratova assaults her viewer are those of
contemporary Soviet society, her message of despair and alarm is broader and more
universal than that of her fellow-Odessan Stanislav Govorukhin's We Can't Live like
This (Tak zhit' nel'zia). Yes, this is the modern Soviet grotesque in which she rubs our
noses but there is little of which contemporary western civilization as a whole is not
guilty as well.
In the first part of the film, shot in black and white from a scenario Muratova had
written years before, the camera follows Natasha (Ol'ga Antonova), a woman doctor
who has just lost her husband and is hysterical with grief. The coarseness of the Soviet
crowd sets her to fighting, and in a mood of total nihilism she invites to her bed a
drunken young man who propositions her on the street. His frontal nudity is intended
to shock the viewer; as in Aleksandr Sokurov's 1989 Save and Protect (Spasi i sokhrani),
it is vehemently anti-erotic rather than exploitative. Suddenly Asthenic syndrome shifts
to color and the black and white segment is revealed to have been a film which we
were watching simultaneously with an unresponsive and uncomprehending Soviet
audience collected for a "meeting with the star." The actress who played Natasha
appears on stage incongruously dressed in tight pants and a flirtatious straw boater;
as the master of ceremonies tries valiantly to evoke a response from the audience,
they file stonily out of the theater. The film suddenly becomes self-referential as Mur-
atova challenges her viewer: "Serious cinema merits discussion ... (German, Sokurov,
Muratova)..." The emcee cries frantically as the audience heads relentlessly for the
subway.
Subway scenes bracket the second, longer part of the film, based on a scenario
by Sergei Popov, who plays the role of Nikolai, the teacher. We first see him as an
immobile body on the floor of a subway station, ignored by the thousands who rush
past or step over him. "Is he drunk?" asks the policeman called to the scene. "No, he's
just asleep," replies the ambulance doctor and they leave him lying there. In the film's
final scene, Nikolai will again fall asleep in a subway car, falling to the floor in the
Slavic Review 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992)

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 Film Reviews 803

pose of an inverted crucifix as the empty train lumbers off into a black tunnel. Between
these two symmetrical scenes, Muratova subjects the viewer to a series of loosely con-
nected vignettes of a world so morally unbearable that Sergei's only escape is his
narcoleptic slumber, mimicking and, in the final scene, perhaps transforming itself
into death.
This film, Muratova's sixth, is clearly her major achievement. But the message it
conveys and the means by which it conveys that message rule out the kind of box-
office success achieved by Abuladze's film both in Russia and abroad. Asthenic Syndrome
has not been released in the United States and I know of no plans to do so. Muratova's
masterpiece deserves to be known far beyond the small circle of those who have seen
its limited Russian screenings or of western scholars with access to poor-quality video
copies.

JANE A. TAUBMAN
Amherst College

Maximum Security Comedy (Komediia strogogo rezhima). Dir. and Screenplay by V. Stu-
dennikov and M. Grigor'ev. Camera, A. Lapshov. Music, V. Pleshak. 78 minutes.
Crown Films, Russia, 1992.

A Sergei Dolatov novel has just been screened in Russia-better late than never. The
film is retitled "Maximum Security Comedy" instead of Dolatov's passionless, "A Stage
Performance," a novella in the form of a delirious diary that he kept while a guard
in a maximum security prison. Of all his works, the filmmakers chose the piece with
the greatest suspense and the strongest political undercurrent. It tells a story of a
patriotic play, "The Kremlin Stars," produced by jailbird amateurs to mark the 60th
anniversary of the revolution. Gangsters and burglars pose as Lenin, Dzerzhinsky,
Sverdlov, a doomed highbrow and other unforgettable figures from an unforgettable
era. Lighthearted and seemingly naive, with mild humor and precision of detail, Dov-
latov's narration is transformed by the film into a bizarre phantasmagoria. Pity it has
none of the matter-of-fact kindness of the literary original, so penetrating in its com-
placency-a picture of the paradoxical Soviet everyday. Dovlatov's prose treats with
charismatic humor the idiotic situations in which the narrator and his friends and
wards find themselves: we see them as normal fruit of an abnormal reality.
The film is different. Heart-rending invectives of Lenin and Stalin are gone, and
the film's characters are traveling other roads. They play at myths in a mythologically
conventionalized world. (As a Dovlatov heroine aptly puts it, "It's so true-to-life! Jus'
like a fairy story!") The film is arranged around mirror effects. An inveterate thief
who stars as Lenin is plotting with his pals to escape right after the premiere. (You
won't find it in the novella-Dovlatov hated spectacular plot turns of the kind. The
real-life prototype, a political leader, is treated like a comic godfather in the film-
not a new idea, but striking enough. If only the film-makers didn't emphasize it so
stubbornly!)
The current Russian cinema zealously repeats past cinematic finds. How it enjoys
itself, mocking socialist realism as it imitates and exaggerates it! Nevertheless, no
consistent aesthetics has emerged as yet in the post-perestroika film treatment of the
Lenin-Stalin myth-something that painters accomplished long ago. So the goal of
"Maximum Security Comedy" is symptomatic. It apes the socialist realistic expressive
idiom in a slap-stick parody-easier to do that than to repair alienation.
The finale, a gang led by the Lenin actor escaping on a locomotive, switches the
whole onto another plane, what I call quasi-artistry, with the vehicle making circles in
a bad cartoon interpolation, a none-too-sophisticated metaphor of the doom we all
share. Simultaneously, the amateur actors are heading in their real-life locomotive for
the neighboring prison-another doom metaphor.
If only the film had less pathos and the acting were less emphatic! Then it would
have followed Dovlatov's pattern, with bolshevik heroes equal to great actors who

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