by Allan Fish
Happiness (USSR 1934 90m)
Aka. Schastye; Le Bonheur
Living like a Tsar
p none d/w Aleksandr Medvedkin ph Gleb Troyanski m Modest Moussorgsky (reissue) art Aleksei Utkin
Pyotr Zinovyev (Khmyr), Mikhail Gipsi (Taras Platonovich), Yelena Yegorova (Anna), Nikolai Cherkassov, Viktor Kulakov, Lidiya Nenasheva,
After seeing this comedy Sergei Eisenstein reputedly said “today I saw how a Bolshevik laughs.” Not only a Bolshevik, of course, for there’s still much to amuse, perhaps surprisingly so for western audiences, in Medvedkin’s film. The director had been a forgotten figure in Soviet film history prior to both his and the film’s rediscovery by Chris Marker in the early seventies. His films were made with the purpose of touring them round the villages of the Soviet Union to show to the local populaces. Its anti-authority stance may make one wonder how it ever escaped the damnation of the hard-line Stalinist authorities of the period, but one can only be happy that it did.
Happiness begins with an old man peeping through a fence at his neighbour eating Vareniki while his wife watches on. He swears to eat Vareniki before he dies, only to die in the attempt of doing so. His grandson is then sent off by his wife to find happiness and not to return until he has found it. After claiming the lost purse of a merchant, he returns to set up a farm, only to lose it all in back taxes and sundry other blood-sucking authorities. Returning from the wars he finds happiness in a collective farm, though not before his old enemy neighbour tries to set fire to the place. (more…)