Another little gem of Soviet cinema is Tri Topolya na Plyuschikhe, year 1968, directed by Tatyana Lioznova and written by long-lived dramatist Alexander Borshagovski. It’s an unassumig story, visually simple yet very touching, that through a brief episode in the life of a villager portrays to us – with great narrative and interpretative skills – a number of genuine and well defined characters, while sets forth several exquisitely chosen sides of rural and urban lives in mid-20th-century Russia.
In barely 75 minutes runtime the creators of this rather unknown work manage to present to us the longings and joys, hardships, problems, hopes and concerns of a few human types belonging to the country at the time: the rude frankness of peasants, the diverse attitudes – often ambiguous from a personal point of view – towards the bolshevik government, its goods and bads; the old shepherd whose wisdom and experience we’re only hinted at; a philantropist local courier, a good-natured war crippled, who endures the best he can his bad tempered wife; an uncouth and dry man, unpopular because of his nondrinkenness, part time poacher, who tries to keep himself and his family free and independent, to some extent, from the omnipresent kolkhozy (collective farms in the Soviet Union, based on joint property of the produced goods, featuring an excessively rigid and bureaucratic administration); a fat grumpy woman, quite a character, who fully supports ‘the system’; the typically rustic way -almost devoid of sophism and artifice- in which friendships and relations arise; the child who listens to Edith Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien on a small radio without barely understanding the lyrics; and among them all, Nurka, a woman native to a neighbouring village who, with unhinhibited resignation, Continue reading “Three Poplars at Plyuschikha”
