Cult Cinema: One Hundred Days After Childhood (1975) - Reviewed

Images Courtesy of Mosfilm

Thirteen years before unveiling his titan sized rock drama epic film Assa onto Soviet silver screens in 1987, Russian film writer-director Sergei Solovyov demonstrated early on he was one of forefathers of chronicling distinctly Soviet youth culture trying to find its footing in the world with his 1974 coming-of-age summer camp drama One Hundred Days After Childhood.  A Sovscope 35mm panoramic widescreen production co-written by Solovyov and screenwriter Aleksandr Aleksandrov and released by Mosfilm the same year as Akira Kurosawa’s Sovscope 70mm Dersu Uzala, the film represents perhaps the best film about adolescent romantic longings to emerge prior to Karen Shakhnazarov’s Courier.  Cementing its leading actress Tatyana Drubich as a Soviet screen sex symbol who would reunite with director Solovyov again in Assa, One Hundred Days After Childhood became Solovyov’s first real critical hit which took home the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 25^th Berlin International Film Festival.  While not quite amassing the ferocious power of Assa, it still is nevertheless a solid youth film about crazy stupid and distinctly Russian love.

 
Young fourteen-year-old student Mitya Lopukhin (Boris Tokarev) whiles away his summer days in the camp-grounds of the Russian country grounds mingling with other young lads his age, guided by a schoolteacher who is rehearsing a stage play with the classmates when his attention is caught by alluringly beautiful and sophisticated Lena Yergolina (Tatyana Drubich).  Though mere acquaintances who have yet to engage in any real conversation while her feelings clearly lie with another classmate, Mitya nevertheless falls madly in love with her and begins enacting all kinds of different forms of passive aggression to get her attention or sympathy whether it involves having a plaster cast put on his foot, feigning illness and getting into fights with her active beau.  While clear to the audience Mitya is barking up the wrong tree as fellow classmate Sonya Zagremuhina (Irina Malysheva in her screen debut) plainly displays feelings for the hero he is all but completely oblivious to as he doubles down on his ill pursuit to “win” Yergolina’s heart.
 
Ethereal, tranquil and at times audiovisually experimental, this handsomely rendered period youth drama revels in the dreamlike wonderment of the summer school glimpsed in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock while introducing a neurotic and clueless horny young male protagonist ala PTA’s Licorice Pizza.  The result is one of the quintessential Soviet coming-of-age films of the 1970s which for impishly ironic effect attaches something of a megaphone to Mitya’s absurd antics.  As with Assa the film makes intentional fourth-wall breaking use of intertitles which help to chart the emotional travelogue taken by Mitya.  

For all of the film’s elegant visual beauty rendered by The Red Tent cinematographer Leonid Kalashnikov who does some wild camerawork and bending of the curvature of the frame with his lens, for as ornately realized on film as this world is we have the foolish dumb lovesick Mitya intruding upon its carefully constructed perfection.  Somehow or another, composer Isaac Schwartz cranked out the elegantly orchestral scores for both this and the aforementioned Dersu Uzala within the same year, a testament to the composer’s ability to generate incredible music under duress.
 
The ensemble cast of young actors is generally good with His Nickname is Beast actor Boris Tokarev as the dim witted foolish Mitya who keeps trying to jump through flaming hula hoops to win the heart of Tatyana Drubich’s unattainable beauty while newcomer Irina Malysheva is practically waving her arms up and down in front of him.  Though a teenager, Tatyana Drubich even at this early young age clearly understood body language and posture as scenes of her donning a bouquet of flowers eating an apple reading a French novel or frolicking barefoot about the dock near the riverside wave unintentional flirtation in the face of our idiot hero.  Obviously a very talented young actress who would evolve into a veteran screen siren in the ensuing years, One Hundred Days After Childhood all but canonizes her sultry confidence in the movies.

 
Though overshadowed both by fellow Japanese master Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala, One Hundred Days After Childhood did become the first real awards winner for director Solovyov who took home the Silver Bear award for Best Director.  In the years since, Solovyov’s work would become more, shall we say, iconoclastic?  Provocative?  Compared to the raging fiery Soviet tragedy/rock drama Assa it doesn’t quite have the same set of fangs.  What it does have however are early warning signs of the director’s keen observations of young love finding its way around either a strictly rigid or nebulous, cloudy world.  More than just another summer camp coming-of-age movie by a great filmmaker in the throes of finding his niche, One Hundred Days After Childhood helped usher in writer-director Solovyov and his screen muse Drubich into the hearts and minds of Russian filmgoers young and old while expertly chronicling a tumultuous period of adolescence traversing into adulthood.  We were all young once.

--Andrew Kotwicki