I spent yet another evening watching shorts from Kino's 2-Disc AVANT- GARDE: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA OF THE 1920s AND '30s Set: this is among the more renowned efforts therein and ranks quite highly on the "Wonders In The Dark" poll of the "All-Time Top 3000 Movies" as well. Still, the end result hardly classifies as an unqualified masterpiece to my eyes...
If anything, it opens with a bang – throwing us smack into the middle of a violent domestic squabble straight out of an Erich von Stroheim melodrama that ends as an axe murder! The film's overall style is indeed comparable, ditto the plot – involving a young woman (the pretty and very expressive Nadia Sibirskaia, also seen here in flashbacks as a carefree teenager!) who is seduced and betrayed by a man (for her less attractive sister), bears his child and ends up living on the streets. Though her sister is herself reduced to prostitution, the heroine – thinking of ending it all – asks her sibling to raise the kid as her own! The man, in the meantime, tries to play his dirty game with yet another woman but gets more than he bargained for, when her family beat the hell out of him (which is practically where we came in)!
In the end, while undeniably interesting, the intrinsic heaviness of the narrative (at its most maudlin when Sibirskaia (who was married to director Kirsanoff in real-life), taking respite on a park bench one cold morning, shares a bit of bread and sausage with an old man sitting beside her!) is rendered even more tiresome – especially at its not inconsiderable length of 38 minutes – by the experimental yet dreary 'city film' approach then in vogue.
If anything, it opens with a bang – throwing us smack into the middle of a violent domestic squabble straight out of an Erich von Stroheim melodrama that ends as an axe murder! The film's overall style is indeed comparable, ditto the plot – involving a young woman (the pretty and very expressive Nadia Sibirskaia, also seen here in flashbacks as a carefree teenager!) who is seduced and betrayed by a man (for her less attractive sister), bears his child and ends up living on the streets. Though her sister is herself reduced to prostitution, the heroine – thinking of ending it all – asks her sibling to raise the kid as her own! The man, in the meantime, tries to play his dirty game with yet another woman but gets more than he bargained for, when her family beat the hell out of him (which is practically where we came in)!
In the end, while undeniably interesting, the intrinsic heaviness of the narrative (at its most maudlin when Sibirskaia (who was married to director Kirsanoff in real-life), taking respite on a park bench one cold morning, shares a bit of bread and sausage with an old man sitting beside her!) is rendered even more tiresome – especially at its not inconsiderable length of 38 minutes – by the experimental yet dreary 'city film' approach then in vogue.