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| Images courtesy of Gorky Film |
Aleksandr Rou was second to Aleksandr Ptushko at the
forefront of Russian fantasy folklore cinema particularly aimed towards child
viewers starring child actors. Going
back to 1933 with Wish Upon a Pike, between Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Morozko the
director dealt in effects-heavy magical realism stemming from either modern or
classical fairy tales. In a curious
career developmental trajectory that seemed to switch sides with his
contemporary Ptushko, the aesthetic of Ptushko moved away from scope widescreen
to a stately 1.33:1 standard fullscreen ratio while Rou with his last three
features Through Fire, Water, and…Brass Pipes, The Fair Barbara and
his final feature The Golden Horns jumped over completely into panoramic
Sovscope vistas. Across four Rou fantasy
films, the character of the evil Koschei witch Baba Yaga (all played by Georgy
Millyar) comes into the proceedings trying to stir up trouble and in Rou’s
final film The Golden Horns the actor initially reluctant about playing Yaga
a fourth time gives his most memorable performance yet as the legendary
adversary.
Co-directed by Viktor Makarov and loosely based on Hutsul
folk tales and Yevgeniy Scwartz’s play Two Maples (itself made into a
Soviet animated short in 1977) and poems by Mikhail Nozkhin with additional
screenwriting by Lev Potyomkin, the last film of Aleksandr Rou produced and
released by Gorky Film is a delightfully colorful fairy tale and rescue saga
filled with magic, talking animals, a singing dancing bread roll and a walking house with chicken legs. Deceptively simple in approach, the
seventy-four minute multicolored romp concerns Evdokia (Raisa Ryazanova from Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears) who lives in the village with her three children
Kiryusha (Volodya Belov), Mashenka (Ira Chigrinova) and Dashenka (Lena
Chigrinova) and an elder named Markel (Georgy Millyar in dual roles). After saving a magic deer with golden horns
from being hunted down by a gang of robbers (including Mikhail Pugovkin and
Savely Kramarov sneaky cameos), her three children are kidnapped, turned into
deer and imprisoned by Baba Yaga.
Prompting a cross-country journey on a mission to rescue her children,
Evdokia ventures and meets with the sun god, the moon god, the wind spirit and
the water spirit before transforming into a mighty superhuman warrioress
herself at the moment of truth.
Featuring a wild bevy of visual effects, extraordinary
production design by Arseni Klopotovsky and A. Ivaschenko, a lovely and playful
score by recurring Rou collaborator Arkadi Filippenko and Sovscope 35mm cinematography
co-opted by I Am Twenty cameraman Yuri Dyakonov and Rou regular Vladimir
Okunev who lensed the director’s prior widescreen efforts, The Golden Horns closes
out the eclectic fantasy filmmaker’s oeuvre with a sumptuously colorful
note. From the luminous look, the speed
with which the story moves forward, the way it veers in and out of comedy,
thriller, children’s film and being one of the early examples of a
larger-than-life screen heroine marching into the hornet’s nest to retrieve her
stolen cubs ala Ripley from Aliens, it stands out for having the most
arresting visuals perhaps in all of Rou’s filmography.
One of the film’s unexpected virtues, again,
stemmed from Georgy Millyar who did not want to reprise the role of Baba Yaga but
agreed to after makeup artist Anatoly Ivanov joked he should play the witch as
if she were ‘two hundred years into her menopause’. The character of Edvokia, played with stern
ferocity and fearless determination by Raisa Ryazanova, becomes our beacon into
dark and scary places as she interacts with talking sun, moon and wind
gods. The aforementioned comedy acting
greats Pugovkin and Kramarov offer welcome laughter amid the witchy comic
thrills of Baba Yaga while the three child actors all stand up unafraid to the
forest demon until they’re transformed into deer via a stroboscopic magic
spell.
Released theatrically in January of 1973 the film did
enormous numbers, having been viewed by some 20 million Soviet moviegoers. Sadly however, as he began preproduction on Finist,
the Brave Falcon which he also co-wrote and further based on poems by
Mikhail Nozhkin, he was rushed to a Moscow hospital where he passed away
shortly after. Though Gennadi Vasilyev (in
his directorial debut) finished the film, it will always be remembered as the
movie Rou was working on before he died.
Rou left behind an eclectic filmography of fantasy folklore epics from the
Soviet Union including but not limited to 3D fantasy features like May
Nights and adventure films like The Secret of Mountain Lake but his
final film may represent the filmmaker working to the very edge of his
inspirations. Though stoking familiar
imagery and lore including the aforementioned Baba Yaga, Rou’s final effort
feels like the work of an artist who has not only figured out how to polish or
sharpen his loose ends but to take something known and reshape it in a way
never thought of or seen before. Of Rou’s
fantasy epics, at present The Golden Horns might be my personal favorite
and the one the shows off the full range of his rich visual imagination.
--Andrew Kotwicki
