Greetings gentle readers and welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s a Russian/Japanese collaboration about love and loss: Moscow, My Love.
Reviews:
Movie Critic says:
Few Russian films achieved greatness during the rigid Totalitarian Soviet regime, which handicapped a great deal of their creative control and made a lot of them feel as if every little scene is cautiously approved (to avoid the term “controlled”), yet there were still interesting achievements here and there. Among them is the joint Japanese-Russian production of the romantic drama “Moscow, My Love”, a refreshingly relaxed, smooth and humble ‘slice-of-life’ story revolving around a Japanese girl studying ballet in the eponymous city. In certain areas, just like most Soviet films, it is dated by today’s standards (for instance, the relic decision that the Japanese dialogue is not subtitled, but atrociously “dubbed” by only one (!) male voice), and thus, congruently, the Japanese director Yoshida did a better job than his Russian counterpart Mitta, whereas the love triangle made an unnecessary turn into the ‘terminal ilness’ genre which turned out overtly melodramatic in the finale, yet it has honest, touching emotions and a good shot compositions thanks to the dynamic camera (one of the best is the almost three minute long shot, filmed in one take, where Wolodja and Yuriko enter a store and sit to order something to drink, while the camera is filming them from outside, while it is still raining). As much as Oleg Vidov is badly miscast for the leading male role, so much is Komaki Kurihara perfectly cast as the leading female role of Yuriko, because she truly has an enchanting screen presence: every gesture she makes is so genuine, charismatic and charming that she truly proves to be one of the most underrated actresses of her time, and the storyline owes 90% of charm to her.
Letterboxd says:
A good film with a fantastic score and good cinematography. However, the ballet sequences went on for too long – sometimes it felt as if I was watching a ballet performance instead of a film. This has a negative impact on the pacing, so I can’t rate it higher.
My take:
It’s an enjoyable, bittersweet love story with a pacifistic heart. It can be melodramatic but it’s innocent and good-hearted and you really feel the tragedy of both the character’s lives as well as the victims of war. There are some interesting if simple uses of light, perspective, and imagery that lend depth to the narrative.
Some reviewers condemned the film as a piece of Soviet propaganda because it ties the bombing of Hiroshima into the story, complete with stock footage of children being treated for radiation burns. I see it differently. I think the film is an anti-war, anti-nuke statement that uses a love story as a vehicle to share those sentiments. One man’s propaganda is another’s heartfelt plea.
I also liked the film because it belies the one dimensional image of the Soviet Union that American Cold War propaganda projects. I grew up during the end of the Cold War and I remember the tales of bread lines and knocks on doors in the middle of the night. Sure, Soviet Communism had serious problems. The state was repressive in many ways. But people still celebrated weddings, went to the beach, ate at restaurants and created art.
Directed by: Aleksandr Mitta, Kenji Yoshida
Written by: Tasiuki Kasikura, Aleksandr Mitta, Edvard Radzinsky
Notable Actors: Komaki Kurihara, Oleg Vidov
Plot (Spoilers!):
Young Yuriko (Kurihara) is a Japanese ballet dancer with a dream. And her dream seems to be coming true. She is invited to join the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. She leaves behind a good friend in Japan, Tetsuya, a friend who loves her.
Moscow seems like paradise to the young lady. It’s a beautiful city full of life and adventure and she can’t get enough of it. The Bolshoi is challenging and she struggles at first with the demands on her skills as a dancer but she improves and lands the lead role in a major production. Things can’t seem to get any better.
Then they do. Yuriko meets a Russian artist Volodya (Vidov), a sculptor, who falls for her immediately. His romantic interest is soon reciprocated by Yuriko in a sweet, innocent way. The pair dash around Moscow hand in hand, enjoying the pleasure of being young and in love.
Yuriko’s friend Tetsuya comes to visit. He wishes to tell her of his love for her but upon meeting Volodya he recognizes the fact that he will only ever be a friend to her. Yuriko is saddened when he leaves Moscow early but her heart belongs to Volodya.
Things take a saddening turn. Yuriko is finding herself tiring easily and at one point collapses in a public place. Rushed to the hospital, she is diagnosed as having leukemia. Her mother, who died of leukemia, had been exposed to radiation from the Hiroshima bombing and the disease was passed along to Yuriko. She loses the role at the Bolshoi, breaking her heart.
Volodya has been working out of town and Yuriko travels to visit him. She tells him of her illness but he refuses to believe that she will not be healed. Upon her return to Moscow however her condition worsens. Confined to a hospital bed, she is visited by a heartbroken Volodya and the two share what little time they have left together. The movie ends with Tetsuya relating that Yuriko died in the spring.
Thank you for this. I have downloaded, and my wife and I will watch with pleasure.
We are almost done with the 12-part Soviet series Seventeen Moments of Spring. It’s a compelling spy thriller, taking place in the last days of World War II with all the expected historical characters and several great moments. Excellent acting and character development with some superb cinematography.
There is a Polish movie with a similar theme: love, arts, and cancer.
It was made 2 years later, in 1976, so it it could be influenced by this Soviet-Japanese production.
This movie is about pianists preparing for Chopin competition.
Title: CON AMORE
Directed by Jan Batory, Poland, 1976
Synopsis: “Andrzej and Grzegorz are students of Warsaw Conservatory and preparing for the International Piano Competition. Eva, Grzegorz’s girlfriend, is seriously ill, the doctors suspect she has brain cancer. Andrzej has a girlfriend Zosia, but the young pianist falls in love with Grzegorz’s girlfriend.”
Here is a link to YT:
https://youtu.be/3XNLP6aE7h8?si=HMRcNl-QNy24xLrR
Thank you for this- I was a young adult in the mid-70’s & for some odd reason, never believed the more florid propaganda of that era – and ended up working for a scientist at UCLA who participated in a scientific exchange w the USSR, during Reagan years. I still have a Russian memento from his trip. The final touch was reading a mktg brochure from international engineering/construction firm, Turner, bragging about their projects in the USSR (mid-@1980’s), so I knew the propaganda was lies by then.
When I worked in Romania it was the movie “era” of the so-called Romanian New Wave (which was way over-valueing those movies by adopting the French New Wave expression). It always annoyed me that Romanian filmmakers appeared incapable of presenting an uplifting lively film, comedy or romcom or whatever using e.g. beautiful locations in Bucharest which has some great spots picturing contemporary life in a non-suicidal manner.
Instead they were churning out the same old same old bleak post-Cold War chliché image almost constantly because it served the snobism and self-esteem of Western cultural elites in Cannes, Venice or Locarno.
Mitta shows how it could have been done for instance. When did one last see in the West Moscow as a world capital with living and breathing human beings in the midst of great classic and modern architecture, parks, trees, as if it were Paris in any of countless movies…
“One man’s propaganda is another’s heartfelt plea.”
Film school staff and film critics should stick this onto their mobile phones and laptops.
p.s. Alexander Mitta died this July. Yoshida was a known anime director.
Mitta
https://www.imdb.com/de/name/nm0594098/?ref_=ttawd_awd_1
Yoshida
https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0071858/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_accord_1_cdt_t_11
p.s. The short highway shot at 5:30 might be a bow to SOLARIS, which had a famous minutes-long shot on – I assume – that same Tokyo highway complex.
p.p.s. I remember Andrei Konchalovsky mocking Americans stating that sex life in Communist Russia was free and progressive beyond anything Westerners would imagine to be the case.
For some sobering reality, with relationships applicable today, have a look at this Romanian film;
4 months 3 weeks 2 days
I think, by, Cristian Mungiu. Proper Eastern European film, everybody chain smoking all the time, reminds my of my youth in the Old Country.
No link. I have it in my database but don’t know where you can get it.
Some Romnaian films here: https://www.youtube.com/@THECINEPUB/videos
A little-known film even in Russia. Pretty boring. It was 1974, when I started my first year of high school. The construction of the BAM (Baikal-Amur Railway) has begun in the country, if that means anything to you. This film was shot in the spirit of Brezhnev’s “struggle for peace.” There were no repressions at that time, except for a few dissidents. It was a good time, and the economy was continuously growing. Life was much poorer than it is now, and the Bolshoi Theatre was at the peak of its greatness.
There’s also East/West (Est/Ouest), from 1999, with Sandrine Bonnaire and Catherine Deneuve, about Russian-Revolution exiles “invited” back by Stalin in 1946.
That looks to have been shot in Bulgaria.
“Few Russian films achieved greatness during the rigid Totalitarian Soviet regime,”
That’s such a bizarre sentence to read. It is a common enough view here, and one I share, that Russian cinema was at its peak during said rigid Totalitarian Soviet regime. Yes, ideological control was a serious and omnipresent complication, but it also compelled film-makers to show ingenuity while trying to work around it. Many mediocre films were made, but also many great and highly distinctive ones. The industry benefitted greatly from the widespread, systematic participation of theatre artists in film-making – those were some of our greatest actors.
Post-Soviet Russian cinema seems to me to consist largely of pretentious artsy films and shoddy attempts to imitate whatever Hollywood is doing. There are, of course, some honourable exceptions, and anyway, my impression could be off since I am not that much of a film fan. But Soviet movies are still wildly popular here for many reasons, and one of them is simply that they don’t make them like they used to – the old studios and their traditions have largely been left to rot in the 90s.
It’s just run-of-the-mill Cold War era brainwashing. Shittalking Soviets/Russians is a Pavlovian reflex that can’t just go away.
The idea that you can’t have great art with a rigid censorship regime is purely ideological. Most great art, probably, has been produced under such conditions. It’s not like Shakespeare could criticize the state.
Yup. Limitations of all sorts are part of the creative process. Monty Python and the Holy Grail used coconuts instead of horses because of budgetary restriction. Some of censorship efforts are even done in public, like the Motion Picture Production Code.
The real purpose of the insinuation is stressing the (fictional) contrast with the USA moviemaking industry, that has “achieved greatness” in more-than-few films, because it was not handicapped by the red boogeyman.