 |
| Images courtesy of Dovzhenko Film |
Moscow born Aelita and Earth actress Yuliya
Solntseva is probably best remembered for becoming the world’s first female
winner of the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival for her 1961 war
drama Chronicle of Flaming Years.
While Soviet Russian, she married Ukrainian film legend Aleksandr
Dovzhenko and co-starred in his film Earth and began working as an
assistant director in the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration, Mosfilm
and soon Kiev Film Studio. Before his
death in 1956, Dovzhenko published an autobiographical memoir about his
childhood in the native village of the Chernihiv region called The Enchanted
Desna regarding the Desna River, the working peasants way of life and what
the region was before the Second World War.
Considered to be an encyclopedic text on Ukrainian rural life and
culture, Yuliya Solntseva sought to bring her late husband’s tale to the silver
screen and over a joint co-production between Mosfilm and Dovzhenko Film she
turned over perhaps one of the most astonishingly beautiful Sovscope 70mm films
on the face of the Earth.
Broken into two halves but jumping between both timelines
throughout, The Enchanted Desna opens on a war-torn Chernihiv village in
ruins as tanks and soldiers barrel on ahead over the landscape as the film’s
omniscient narrator Aleksandr Petrovich (Yevgeny Samoilov) muses about better days
of heaven as a plucky youth wandering sunflower fields in a lively and colorful
Ukrainian village. Interspersed between
experiences with his grandparents and mother, the film becomes a tapestry of
Ukrainian culture and iconography lensed in crisp 2.20:1 65mm by Chronicle
of Flaming Years cinematographer Aleksei Temerin and a sweeping evocative
score by Gavriil Popov of Island of Doom. The central performance by the child actor
portraying young Aleksandr will recall for some Satyajit Ray’s The Apu
Trilogy and its naturalistic neorealist acting.
Though running a mere eighty-one minutes and largely told as
naturalistic pure cinema, The Enchanted Desna which Jean-Luc Godard named
his favorite film of 1964 is dripping from top to bottom with jaw dropping
splendor and beauty. Absolutely astounding
visually, perhaps the best looking Sovscope 70mm film next to War and Peace,
Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven and Dersu Uzala and aided by a
powerful score, just watching the film inspires a sense of aching almost
desperate awe. Your eyes can’t believe
the scenery and in later scenes that play around with film editing and camera visual
effects, you feel a little bit of the phantasmagoria stirring up that would or
wouldn’t evolve into Sergei Parajanov’s psychedelic Shadows of Forgotten
Ancestors. That it exists in such a
dire technical state with no known restoration work to speak of as of yet is a
tragedy, but supposedly in 2023 70mm screenings of an intact print were
arranged so there’s still hope.
Years later, after winning the Special Jury Prize at the San
Sebastian International Film Festival, the film came up again in 1985 via The
Smiths’ album Meat is Murder when the single for the song That Joke
Isn’t Funny Anymore used a lobby card for the film as the single’s
cover. In our current sociopolitical
climate, watching The Enchanted Desna and its dichotomy between past
utopia and present war-torn Europe feels somewhat urgent and vital in the
preservation of Ukrainian culture and iconography. Outside of the political spectrum and the
sphere of war engulfing the country currently, The Enchanted Desna is
pure cinema magic sure to float any and all who encounter it out of their seats
towards the stars, fields and sunflowers in this radiant, luminescent 70mm
Ukrainian autobiography by maybe the country’s most important narrative
creative visionary. Fingers crossed
someone in the boutique label omniverse is listening and is able to pull some
strings and make this grand dream a flesh and blood reality.
--Andrew Kotwicki
