by Allan Fish
(Bulgaria 1966 77m) not on DVD
Aka. Ritzar bez bronya
The knight of the shining crystal
p Vulcho Yordanov d Borislav Sharaliev w Valeri Petrov ph Atanas Tasev ed Ventzeslava Karenesheva, Evgeniya Radeva m Vasil Kazandziev art Mariya Ivanova
Oleg Kovachev (Vanyo), Apostol Karamitev (uncle), Mariya Rusalieva (Emiliya, mother), Tsvyatko Nikalov (Stamov, father), Tanya Massalatinova (Miss Kirilova), Sonya Markova (reporter), Katya Stoyanova (Rosamund), Oleg Popov,
When Toto Cascio first beamed from movie posters for Cinema Paradiso he seemed like all the movie moppets of the past rolled into one. His wasn’t so much a performance as a thematic condensation of what it is to be a child. At the time I’d never seen a kid like him, and while we have seen some special child/teen talents come and go, especially on the distaff side (Ana Torrent, Patricia Gozzi, Jaroslava Schallerova, Zsuzsa Czinkóczi), Cascio still remained the moppet’s moppet.
All that changed with discussion with a fellow film buff who pointed me in the direction of a film called Knight Without Armour. My initial thoughts were naturally of the film on the preceding page, of Donat and Dietrich in revolutionary Russia, but it quickly became clear that this was something very different. A Bulgarian film about childhood, not a film you would find in western film histories.
For Toto in Sicily substitute Vanyo in communist Bulgaria in a film which takes place in three acts. The first finds Vanyo in the back seat of his father’s car as he and his parents go out for the day. On the way, his father gets into trouble with a traffic cop for not indicating and Vanyo gets the blame when anything goes wrong. In the second part Vanyo is playing out in the streets wearing cardboard armour made by his father, with a toy sword, and going off to find his two best musketeers friends. The role played differs from day to day, from minute to minute – d’Artagnan, Robin Hood, Don Quixote, Scaramouche, it’s all the same to Vanyo and his chums. In the last part Vanyo seeks someone to repair his bike chain and finds his favourite Uncle and spends time with him.
There have been numerous great films made about childhood, many far better known than Sharaliev’s film, but none gave me quite such recollections of endless days spent playing out in the fading summer light. Vanyo is a kid like we have all known and some of us have been at some time or another, boasting to friends; my dad’s better than your dad, our car’s better than your car. The kids even have their own password/motto (“from near or from afar, defend the knighthood star.”) when wandering the streets of their town arm in arm looking for bullies to fight and derring-do to perform. Yet there’s a sense of regret looking back, for now even my childhood seems from another world. Kids rarely play out any more, a sense of fantasy role-play lost to video games and videophones, so lost without them that when they do go out, they can only congregate on street corners as if searching for an inspiration their predecessors never needed.
It’s not all about kids at play, though. The adult characters are clearly defined and the script has a keen eye for detail. There’s a subplot about Vanyo’s favourite teacher being forced out of her job by a Ministry bigwig who just wants to give her job to his own niece. The father is in one respect a boastful show off, too proud of his position to upset the applecart and think about who’s in the right. In addition there’s a sense of audience participation, as at select moments a voice addresses Vanyo directly, in the manner of an onlooker. There are so many remembrances of one’s own childhood to tie into it that one almost forgets that this is a story being played out against a backdrop of a totalitarian regime. But while regimes and ideologies will fade and crumble in the dust, the sense of childhood adventures endure and it’s exemplified by little Oleg Kovachev as Vanyo, one of the great movie kids, transported as if from the Beano without a catty and peashooter. Yet they have swords and all the world’s a playground and all the boys and girls merely players.
Great find here apparently. The subject matter has me quite interested. Terrific review.