E-Mail This Article to a Friend Difficult People The microcosms of Kira Muratova BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	"Kira Muratova Retrospective" Presented by Seagull Films and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. At the Museum of Fine Arts through June 12.
	Related Links Museum of Fine Arts' official Web site Chris Fujiwara reviews Kira Muratova's Chekhov’s Motifs

No other director presents people the way Kira Muratova does. Her uncompromising films are filled with histrionics, rhetorical steam baths, people talking at the same time and not listening to one another, emotionalism juxtaposed with coolness. Gestures, actions, exchanges, lines of dialogue get repeated and drawn out past reasonable bounds. Such absurdism would be easier to absorb if it were just absurdism, but Muratova leaves her audience defenseless in the face of what’s arguably the most subversive aspect of her work: her refusal to treat people as repulsive or ridiculous.

Born in Romania and repatriated to the Soviet Union as a child, Muratova has spent most of her career in Ukraine. Since 1967, she’s made 12 feature films, eight of which will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in its edition of a touring retrospective of her work. The Asthenic Syndrome (1989; May 27 at 7:20 p.m., replacing The Tuner, June 5 at 10:30 a.m., and June 9 at 3:45 p.m.), a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, is the best introduction to Muratova. A vast-canvas film made up of nothing but intimate details, it comes in two parts. The first, in black and white, is about a rejection: walking away from her husband’s burial, Natasha, a doctor, refuses to conceal her grief and anger and takes to berating strangers and barreling into them on the sidewalk. The second part, in color, concerns Nikolai, a high-school English teacher with literary aspirations. Unable to cope with the demands posed by his students, his wife and mother-in-law, and the world at large, Nikolai withdraws from every challenge by falling asleep.

With a comic vigor that gets impetus from sadness and rage, Muratova depicts urban life under glasnost as a succession of crises, jolts, and disruptions. The official ideology that was supposed to organize all this has been abandoned to parody, and the only options left to the individual, other than brutality, are escalated aggressiveness or withdrawal. The greatness of the film lies in Muratova’s determined embrace of the fragmentary. The Asthenic Syndrome is a universe of compact microcosms that ignore one another: the school storage room, filled with busts of Lenin, where Nikolai goes to commune with his muse; an apartment where a man tends caged birds while his daughter dances alone to a David Byrne record; a fish seller’s stand besieged by a clamoring, pushing crowd.

Long Farewells (1971; May 29 at 12:10 p.m.) is the sad, funny, and beautiful story of a divorced mother and her late-adolescent son: her fear of losing him, his need to be free of her. It begins without telling us what to look for, what to care about, how we should judge these characters. Piece by piece, Muratova assembles an allusive mosaic of early-1970s Soviet life, including aspects and attitudes that threatened cultural officials of the period, who banned the film (it was not shown in public until 1987). The sadness of Long Farewells is that of a world about to end, of the rupturing of a continuity based on a lie that’s not only a lie and a truth that’s not fully a truth.

Long Farewells shares with its predecessor, the love triangle Brief Encounters (1967; May 28 at 11 a.m.), a style that highlights roughness: the films are filled with zooms, rack focuses, hand-held camera moves, shots that seem too close, sudden incursions of lyricism (the younger woman’s flashbacks in Brief Encounters; the shots of a girl’s hair in Long Farewells). The largely post-synchronized soundtracks are hard, brittle, and overfull. Muratova’s awkward, off-balance framing cuts off characters’ faces or leaves them partly concealed by other objects, which draw attention to themselves with random intractability.

Since The Asthenic Syndrome, Muratova has made several films that explore the conflict between everyday life and a culture of beauty. Her take on this clash may seem oblique or perverse, especially to filmgoers familiar with the straightforward pro-high-culture positions staked out by Aleksandr Sokurov in such post-Soviet films as Stone and Whispering Pages. The differences between the two directors are clear enough, especially since the real-time excursion of Sokurov’s Russian Ark finds its counterpart in Chekhov’s Motifs (2002; June 4 at 3:35 p.m. and June 8 at 7:45 p.m.), in which Muratova devotes an hour of screen time to a Russian Orthodox wedding. The likely reactions of the film audience are mirrored by the elegant on-screen guests, who complain about how stuffy it is in the church and how long the ceremony is taking. Even the bride and groom talk to each other and yawn.

Muratova seems at first to be making a simple point about the lack of respect for tradition among today’s wealthy Russians. But it quickly becomes clear that this is not — or not only — what the scene is about. For one thing, the people on screen seem not to belong to the present time: occupying instead some limbo of behavior, speech, and costume, the characters both emulate and parody 19th-century culture in a way that seems peculiarly self-conscious. These characters are in the tradition of Muratova people who conceive of themselves as performers, who are presented as such, and whom it thus becomes difficult simply to reject as social types. The groom especially, though at first he seems to correspond to a stereotype of nouveau riche vulgarity, becomes an increasingly complex figure, so that it comes as not quite a total surprise when, at the end of the ceremony, he turns out to be an accomplished operatic tenor. (In The Asthenic Syndrome, a woman’s terrible amateur trumpet recital of "Strangers in the Night" is suddenly accompanied on the soundtrack by a string orchestra and rhythm section; then, on a cut, her inept playing is replaced by a confident professional solo. Muratova refuses the pointless easiness of simply making fun of the woman and makes the moment touching.)

Finally, Muratova’s updating of Chekhov (Chekhov’s Motifs draws on two works — the little-known play "Tatiana Repina" and the short story "Difficult People") is almost devoid of allusions to contemporary realities. Chekhov’s Motifs is less pathos than fantasy. Muratova doesn’t use the difference between Chekhov’s time and the present to critique the present — rather, she pulls off a fusion of the two that highlights the universality of the Chekhovian themes the film takes up: love, death, and money.

Tikhomirov, the hero of the first segment of Muratova’s splendid, sinister Three Stories (1997; June 9 at 6 p.m. and June 12 at 1:50 p.m.), is a cross between Turgenev’s "superfluous man" and Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. After killing his neighbor, Tikhomirov repairs to a large boiler room, the sprawling underground domain of his friend, a ponderous and gesticulating poet. In obsessive close-ups, the slashed throat of the corpse is revealed, then hidden, as the clear plastic sheet covering the body is alternately lifted and replaced (a rhythmic, repetitive effect that is itself a repetition from a scene early in The Asthenic Syndrome).

The second and longest segment of Three Stories introduces the extraordinary Renata Litvinova as Ophelia, a homicidal maternity-hospital assistant whose promotion to the position of archive clerk enables her to track down the mother who put her up for adoption. Litvinova writes her own lines (the monologue is her preferred mode of discourse, as was said of a character in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome) and bears authorial responsibility for her persona, a feminine masquerade of breathtaking inauthenticity.

The actress’s glossy, compulsive, hyperæstheticized vapidity highlights the way Three Stories is about performance, something that again becomes clear in the third episode, which confronts a wheelchair-bound retiree with a budding young femme fatale in the form of his neighbor’s five-year-old. The old man’s dignified reproachfulness and the Chekhovian setting (a porch on a sunny afternoon) set up a context that makes the little girl’s entropic behavior the more disturbing, and her threat to privatize his house after he’s dead brings into focus a world of random terror.

Litvinova is on display again in The Tuner (2004), Muratova’s latest film, whose screenings the MFA had to cancel because no print was available. An earlier Muratova-Litvinova collaboration, Passions (1994; May 29 at 2 p.m. and June 3 at 6 p.m.), which deals with horse racing and horse-racing enthusiasts, is an enjoyable oddity that, apart from allowing Muratova to indulge her great love of animals, proves again that she is an artist who can go only one way: her own.