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| Images courtesy of Mosfilm |
Soviet Russian writer-director-actor-songwriter Yuri
Chulyukin started out as the son of a Bolshoi Theatre director before working
his way into a tenure with Mosfilm as a comedy director. On only his third feature Devchata aka
The Girls, a carefree romantic comedy full of visual beauty, rugged
frozen terrain, colorful characters and a wealth of original music, he quickly established
himself as one of the box-office frontrunners of Soviet cinema. Perhaps the quintessential portrait of life
in the below zero Middle Urals mountainous terrain with a spunky resourceful
heroine navigating its frozen grounds, the film based on the story of the same
name by Boris Bedny and its lead actress Nadezdha Rumyantseva have been
described as a female-driven Charlie Chaplin comedy with a lot of physicality
onscreen while also being very much a ladies film which just so happened to
premiere theatrically on the eve of International Women’s Day.
Sometime in the late 1950s, The Girls opens on a plucky
pig-tailed young schoolgirl named Tosya (Nadezhda Rumyantseva) with a cooking
degree embarking on working within an isolated Middle Urals Russian logging
camp. Assigned as a cook and assigned to
a dorm room with other female roommates, she helps herself to her roomies’ food
much to one of the girls’ chagrin.
Though a fight breaks out between the girls, Tosya can stand up for
herself and doesn’t back down despite her seeming meek outward appearance. Meanwhile the male logging rival groups
on-site in the dorm next door led by Ilya (Nikolai Rybnikov) notice Tosya’s
tenacity when Ilya tries and fails to get her to turn off loud music she’s
dancing to and a bet is made between Iyla can get her to fall in love with him
before the end of the week. The trouble
is the resourceful and street-smart Tosya gets wind of the bet, causing an
unlikely romantic feud between the two potential lovebirds.
Though an escapist Valentine’s Day sort of date movie, the
portrait of life in the Urals makes it one-of-a-kind as a distinctly Russian
yet universally appealing lovey-dovey rib-tickler. You don’t simply come away with smiles and
hearts bubbling about. There’s a very
real portrait of lifestyle and survival onscreen that mixes with the romcom
charms that makes this kind of an indelible offering. Take for instance scenes of men frozen in the
snow and ice working away at logging while Tosya offers to bring them soup and
potatoes. The men scoff but her survival
instincts cause her to name off all the different uses of potatoes you can
make. Then there’s the social hall with
the nightly town dances and the interplay between the spoiled mean girls and
the handsome nice leading men our Tosya finds herself being bounced around
between.
Shot on location in the Siberian Middle Urals before
below-zero temperatures proved too difficult while much of the rest of it was
shot in Yalta in August oddly enough by renowned cinematographer Timofey
Lebeshev (father of Pavel Lebeshev) in Sovscope widescreen in luminous black-and-white
and aided by a playful original score by female songwriter and composer Aleksandra
Pakhmutova, the look and sound of The Girls is escapist whimsy with a
heavy laborious edge to it. You can feel
the weight of the loggers’ workload and the below-zero wind chills bristling
against the actors’ faces. Some of the
nighttime compositions of the soft glow of the snow in the Urals are so
painterly you could frame them as a snapshot of an arctic world. Granted some shots on Mosfilm’s soundstages
in Moscow were done like planting hundreds of trees to create a Siberian backdrop,
but a chunk of it was filmed out in the elements.
As for the performances, there’s a curious backstory behind
them. For instance, director Yuri
Chulyukin’s original first choice for Tosya was his wife Natalya Kustinskaya
before the artistic council deemed her too pretty for the role and went with
Nadezhda Rumyantseva. Rumyantseva was in
actuality thirty years old despite being tasked with playing a plucky eighteen-year-old. As for Ilya the romantic lead caught in the
middle, the role went to Nikolai Rybnikov after a successful role in the film The
Height. Intending to have his wife
Alla Larionova costar for the role of Anfisa before it ultimately went to
Svetlana Druzhinina, the unlikely pairing resulted in some chilly comingling
on-set. Nevertheless, despite some of
the behind-the-scenes tensions the ensemble cast pulls the task off admirably
with the vista of Tosya munching away at her roommates’ food without a care in
the world became one of the defining screen images of Soviet cinema.
Premiering at the Central House of Cinema in Moscow in 1962
which included nearly all but one member of the cast and crew (Inna Makarova
backed out), Soviet authorities were lukewarm to the romcom noting it’s ‘mundanity’
and ‘pettiness’ and it was given a third rental category. Despite this and the behind-the-scenes
tensions between the cast members and Nikolai Rybnikov nearly tearing his lips
in the frozen below-zero conditions, The Girls nevertheless became a
popular audience favorite leader of Soviet film distribution being seen by as
many as almost thirty-five million people.
Though it’s reputation in the West remains under the radar for some,
this multiple award-winning crowd pleaser including the 1962 Cannes Film
Festival Honorary Diploma of the Jury of Parents and Students honor is a
delightful, whimsical winter date movie that proves the warmth of love can be
found even in the coldest most remote places on Earth.
--Andrew Kotwicki
