At 69, Director Is Still at the Top of His 'Game'

Pyotr Todorovsky graduated from Moscow's VGIK film school in 1954, the year after Stalin died. Since then, in a 40-year career, he has created some of the best-loved and most critically successful postwar Soviet films, many of which became symbols of the changing times through which he worked.


To judge from his latest movie, "Kakaya Chudnaya Igra" (What a Wonderful Game), which premiered recently at Moscow's Dom Kino, Todorovsky is not only surviving the general collapse of the Soviet film system, but flourishing. At the age of 69 he has produced one of the finest works of his career.


He began work in the mid-1950s as a cameraman at the Odessa film studios. In 1965, he made the move into direction with his first film "Vernost" (Fidelity), which received the best debut prize at the Venice film festival, but it was with 1968's "Fokusnik" (The Conjuror) that he achieved real prominence. Shot in black and white, in the neorealist style favored by many of the more thoughtful Soviet directors of the time, the film showed a colorful central character at odds with the tedium and futility of the society around him. It was a fitting symbol for the transition from the optimism of the Khruschev years to Brezhnevite stagnation and opened up a theme which became a mainstay of late-Soviet art cinema.


The next peak of Todorovsky's career was his 1984 release, "Voenno-Polevoi Roman" (A Battlefield Romance) which marked a bold break with his earlier work. A classical love story set just after World War II, the film managed the rare feat of appealing not only to the broad public and Soviet authorities but to foreign critics as well -- it was a prize-winner at the Berlin Film Festival that year.


Populism was also the hallmark of Todorovsky's 1989 hit, "Interdevochka." Although not his most artistically satisfying film, the movie's depiction of the struggle of a hard-currency prostitute to make a decent life for herself amidst a Soviet system just opening up to the outside world, evidently struck a powerful chord with the public, winning it huge audiences in the Soviet Union. Its head-on, moralistic approach to a fashionable social issue makes it comparable to such Hollywood movies as "Philadelphia" and "The Accused." "Interdevochka" was one of the last domestically produced films to win a mass audience in the Soviet Union before the catastrophic decline in state support and audience attendance gripped the film industry at the end of perestroika.


In the face of these new conditions, many of the older generation of Soviet directors simply ceased to work. Todorovsky, however, has continued to shoot films -- and to some effect. His last film, "Encore, Yesho Encore" (Encore, Again Encore), a comedy about the Soviet army in the years after the war, won the Grand Prix at the 1993 Kinotaur Festival and the best film prize at the Nika awards of that year. The enthusiastic reception "What a Wonderful Game" received from the notoriously demanding audience of professional filmmakers and critics at Dom Kino in May suggests that this success was no flash in the pan.


"What a Wonderful Game" portrays the life of four film-school students at the start of the 1950s, sharing a room in a student hostel on the outskirts of Moscow. Stalin is still alive, life is poor and hard, yet the protagonists manage to live a carefree existence centered around playing pranks and sexual escapades.


Todorovsky has made a virtue of the necessity of working on a low budget -- the film was financed and produced by Russian studios rather than by foreign co-producers. His strong cast, including the outstanding up-and-coming comic actor, Vyacheslav Nazarov, who played the lead in Jiri Menzel's recent adaptation of "Ivan Chonkin," and other young stars like Andrei Ilyin as the more serious Felix, give flawless performances, which together succeed in creating a self-contained, soap-operatic world within the winter-bound student hostel.


At first glance the work seems to be a period piece on the by now well-worn theme of daily life under Soviet totalitarianism. But soon the film's greatest strength becomes evident, in Todorovsky's unashamedly subjective portrayal of the mentality and behavior of his protagonists. It is as if a bunch of contemporary students were transported back in time to the Stalin era. They are sexually adventurous and irreverent toward the symbols of Soviet authority. Think of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" set in 1951 Moscow. It seems that Todorovsky has filtered his memories of the '50s -- he is an exact contemporary of his student heros -- through the consciousness of someone who has experienced the ideological upheavals of the intervening 40 years.


Perhaps the ability of an artist who grew up under Stalin to mine his youth as a setting for comedy, shows that, at last, this period has ceased to be either unmentionable -- or obsessional -- but has become just one more moment in history. Life under Stalinism becomes not so much horrifying as ridiculous when put into incongruous contrast with the contemporary consciousness of the central characters.


For instance, a favorite trick of the students is for one of them to hide and impersonate the radio in their room. The seemingly all-knowing Voice then tells the unsuspecting neighbors the students have lured to their room that the authorities know their innermost secrets and are taking the appropriate measures. Such is the spirit of the times that everyone falls for this improbable trick. It's extremely funny, but also sinister. The victims are shot staring aghast into their reflection on the radio case as if caught on one of Orwell's telescreens. Not surprisingly, the last laugh is at the expense of the tricksters.


It is only at this final moment when the "Wonderful Game" goes horribly sour, that Todorovsky loses his otherwise sure touch in preserving the integrity of his fantasy world against the historical tragedy of Stalinism. The ending seems out of tune and out of touch with the spirit of the rest of the film and, as a result, is neither comic nor shocking. This aside, Todorovsky's new film is a rare achievement, and must be counted both as one of the most entertaining and most thought-provoking of recent Russian movies. Let's hope it receives the wide distribution that it deserves.