Mosfilm: Autumn Marathon (1979) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Mosfilm

Georgian born Soviet actor-writer-director and 1989 People’s Artist of the USSR Georgiy Daneliya is perhaps best known for his absurdist surrealist sci-fi Mad Max inspired venture Kin-dza-dza! and his 1964 youth drama Walking the Streets of Moscow.  A prolific filmmaker dating back to 1958 when he started out with short films eventually worked his way up to a distinctive mixture of comedy and drama bordering on tragedy, Daneliya’s work often skirted between or fused together disparate genres as a new form of satirical socialist realism.  Though not as well known as the aforementioned films, Georgiy Daneliya’s perhaps best work is a multiple award-winning romantic midlife crisis dramedy from 1979 entitled Autumn Marathon.
 
Andrey Buzykin (Oleg Basilashvili) is a well-to-do wedded English-to-Russian teacher and translator stationed in Leningrad.  Despite being seemingly happily married to Nina (Natalya Gundareva), Andrey has a mistress in the form of his secretary named Alla (Marina Neyolova) whom he sees on the side.  However, as a Danish professor named Bill Hansen (Norbert Kuchinke) whom he goes on his morning runs with comes into the picture while his mechanic neighbor Kharitonov (Yevgeny Leonov) drags the two of them into picking mushrooms and getting drunk mid-day, Andrey’s carefully constructed double life starts coming apart at the seams with virtually every character growing cross with his misdeeds and inability to keep his stories straight and people separate.

 
Skirting a fine line between comedy, tragedy and even horrified shock, the tongue-in-cheek sardonic affair of Autumn Marathon is like something of a Soviet progenitor to Martin Scorsese’s “comedy” of errors After Hours where you’re inclined to laugh just to relieve some of the awkward tension and anxiety.  Originally written as a stage play by Aleksandr Volodin called The Woeful Life of a Rogue, as the film’s hapless protagonist slips on one banana peel after another by his own volition and gets deeper into chaos it becomes something of a critique of the ideal Soviet citizen that operates uncritically with a marked inability to simply decline unreasonable requests.  The tragic elements and tonality gradually pours in as the consequences of Andrey’s modus operandi come back to haunt him and more especially his family of loved ones.

 
Exquisitely lensed in mannered medium close-ups often trained on the beleaguered Andrey’s face thanks to Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven cinematographer Sergei Vronsky and gifted a somber yet ironic score by recurring Eldar Ryazanov collaborator Andrei Petrov, Autumn Marathon looks and sounds lovely despite being adorned with proceedings where we’re not sure whether to laugh, cry or merely exhale an exasperated sigh.  The ensemble performances across the board are splendid, particularly the tragicomic weathers of Oleg Basilashvili as Andrey.  The camera closes in on his troubled face, his eyes projecting sincerity but also sadness as he realizes his life is completely spiraling out of control.  Of particular tragic note are the two main women of the piece, Nina his married wife and Alla his mistress.  Neither person are given his full attention as he skirts from one event to the next thing and then some.  Special attention also goes to his two “buddies” the fish-out-of-water Danish professor played by Norbert Kuchinke and Yevgeny Leonov as Kharitonov the boozing mechanic whose drunkenness leads to pesky shenanigans running afoul of the police.

 
When first screened for Mosfilm heads, there were concerns about the film’s interpretive if not open-ended finale being read as downbeat and despite suggestions for a happier outcome writer-director Georgiy Daneliya stood his ground for a more complex neither black nor white coda.  Despite controversies over how this out-of-control saga should close, the film became a multiple award winner including the Venice Film Festival for Best Actor Yevgeny Leonov and for the International Evangelical Jury prize of the Berlin Film Festival.  The film was submitted for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film but was denied at the time due to the presence of the Soviet military in Afghanistan. 

 
Looking at Autumn Marathon years later, the film is pointedly bold and while funny it drops some heavy questions upon the viewer to wrestle with.  Much more striking contextually than the visually arresting Kin-dza-dza! and perhaps even more outlandish as the film’s tragic beleaguered antihero gets further and further in over his head, the film is a deliberately difficult yet impishly humorous exercise in Soviet socialist realism as outlandish, perhaps even stressful dark comedy.  The kind of film that leaves you feeling somewhat dizzied and dazed by the end of its unraveling, Autumn Marathon is perhaps Georgiy Daneliya’s finest hour as a director in a film that sneaks up on you and strikes in ways unexpectedly sad, amusing and ultimately critical of the world it takes place in.

--Andrew Kotwicki