I am not a Tarkovsky fan and I feel rather proud that I've not spent the boring hours needed to take in his whole oeuvre. But I like this little film for itself, without reference to his later works. To me, it is full of the sounds, sights, terrors and illuminations of the days of childhood. While on some political level, the little violinist's situation may be a metaphor for the artist in Soviet society who is both persecuted and envied, to me it simply expresses the reality of childhood bullying. The child's encounters with his violin teacher, with a little girl, with a roadway worker and with his mother are all realistic and plausible. I love the realism of the situation of a fatherless child striving for male bonding and constrained by the feminine and orderly influences in his life to renounce it. And I can also see the extremely well-crafted photography, lighting and composition, the interplay of rain and sunlight and the almost ethereal primary colours of the film as the basic components of a lonely seven-year-old's day as transcended by imagination and poetry. Anyone who has spent his childhood in a moderately ancient and relatively unpolluted urban landscape, who has been singled out from his peers because of a special talent or status and who has on occasion taken refuge in daydreams can identify with this film.
Review of The Steamroller and the Violin
