It took my Russian-Jewish father eight years of tiny strokes to end up in the same enfeebled condition as Leonid Loktev, a Russian-Jewish émigré computer analyst residing in Colorado who got there instantly in 1989, when he was hit by a car, flipped through the air, and landed on his head. My father finally crumpled up and died a year ago, but for me, he’s there again on screen in Moment of Impact (which the Museum of Fine Arts will show April 17 and 20), New York–based filmmaker Julia Loktev’s intense, heartbreaking feature documentary about her irreparably injured but still-living dad.
How well I know "Lenny" Loktev’s purgatorial day as he remains stubbornly among the undead: spooning down mushy food in some atavistic desire to exist (a compulsive Jewish eater?) while his eyes shift from confusion to fear to apathy, his brain going on and off like a traffic light spun about by a tornado. My father affected a sweet smile and could say, "I’m fine." Poor Lenny can’t get his facial muscles to move, so his impassivity registers, to those he’s watching, as some kind of judgment. "Are you mad at me? I feel you are angry at me," his daughter asks as he stares her down. Maybe he wishes to say, "Julia, you are the light of my life," but nobody can know. Occasionally, Lenny pushes a word out, like a glob of phlegm. But a sentence? A miraculous complete thought? Never. Except for one complicated Pushkin poem left over from his from Leningrad days, which he whispers in Russian. All of it!
My Russian-Jewish mother and Julia’s mother are both named Larisa/Laura, and both became slaves to their mentally crippled infirm husbands. Yet the differences are striking. Mine is an old-fashioned mom without job aspirations who devoted herself to my dad for more than a half-century of marriage. She loved him completely, putting her tiny little spouse on the highest pedestal. The nicest man on earth. She was worn down taking care of him, bathing him, cleaning up his endlessly soiled underwear, but she was repaying him for being so kind to everyone before his strokes.
And Larisa and Lenny? Larisa is also a computer analyst, and she does a lot of talking in Moment of Impact, but there is not a single nostalgic story from her lips about their life before the catastrophe. What kind of marriage did they have? We do know that on the day of the accident, they were squabbling. Lenny wanted to waste his time at garage sales, even though no-nonsense Larisa informed him that he didn’t need anything. Annoyed at his wife, he went off anyway and was smashed by that auto as he walked from one garage sale to another.
And their life years later? Larisa dutifully watches over Lenny night and day. But never once does she say she loves him. And she is repulsed by the idea that she is a hero, as people tell her. She also rejects the idea of being totally devoted to another person, because that robs you of your identity. What she is is dead tired and totally resentful of being stuck, with no end in sight. Although she doesn’t feel that she’s a wife, she has no interest in another romance. Washing and cleaning Lenny has robbed her of sexual desire. Never again, she tells her daughter, does she want to see a male member.
There’s no religious basis for her self-sacrifice either, since Larisa is a non-believer. So what she is doing is, for her, devoid of spiritual meaning, laughably non-transcendent. And Lenny will get the last chuckle because, chances are, he will outlive her.
What a black comedy! Could the protagonist of any movie be any less sentimental about being a do-gooder? Only once does Larisa slip up and reveal a humanist thought: she admits that she brought Lenny home from a nursing home because she was horrified to think of him confined forever in a tiny room there with a bed, a table, a lamp. But now it’s she who’s the prisoner.
Julia Loktev filmed Moment of Impact in raw, edgy black-and-white over the course of two extended visits to her parents’ home. She shot and took sound simultaneously, and she edited the film herself; the results are remarkable in every area. This is the most cinematic of documentaries, a spare, smart, beautifully crafted work. I might argue that at 117 minutes it’s too long, that it’s almost sadistic in the way it rubs our nose in the Loktevs’ troubles. But that’s exactly what Julia wants it to do — she wants us to feel her family’s daily pain. As she’s explained in an interview, the two hours of the film are the time it takes each day for her mother to give Lenny a bath.
Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com
