The first and only film of Alexander Askoldov, and reportedly the last film under glasnost to be brought out from the Soviet closet, where it had been shut away for twenty years. Reasons for this disciplinary action — never mind any "official" ones — might conceivably have something to do with the movie's frank acknowledgment of the existence of anti-Semitism in the USSR of 1922. To speculate along these lines requires putting oneself in someone else's shoes, or iron boots. It would be altogether too easy for a Westerner to be blasé about the movie's seeming inoffensiveness. (The scene, however, of Jewish children play-acting as their own persecutors, roughly equivalent to American Indians playing "cavalry," would be a strong scene anywhere on earth.) The story, set amid post-revolutionary turmoil, tells of a stout-figured and somewhat battleaxe-ish Red Army officer who has gotten herself inconveniently pregnant and is secreted away to the Jewish ghetto, to board with a family of seven. The heart of the thing is the informal tutelage in The Feminine that this career soldier receives from a traditional Jewish housewife and mother of five. There is a lot else around this heart, including plenty of fatty tissue (the Broadway Jewishness of the man of the house, a humble tinsmith of overweening camera-consciousness) and plenty of decorative muscle (some expressive bits of first-person camerawork, and sometimes third-person-omnipotent). With Nonna Mordukova. (1967) — Duncan Shepherd
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