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I am Twenty (1961, released 1964)

It is Moscow in the early 1960s. In this transitional period, when Stalin’s death opened up new possibilities for private life in Soviet society, we meet three young men and a young woman who can almost bring themselves to believe that they are entitled to a life that will be individually meaningful. They search for authenticity in a city that seems both ordinary and extraordinarily vivid. We don’t just watch Sergei, Slava, Kolya, and Anya; we follow them to school and work, to a spontaneous evening of dancing and music in the courtyard of their apartment building, we are plunged into the crowd at a surprisingly joyful May Day parade and into the audience at a public poetry spectacle that feels more like a rock concert. The director, Marlen Khutsiev, gives us intimacy amid public spectacle, so we feel the characters’ self-confidence in looking forward and their increasing frustration at the limitations set before them.

The close personal point-of-view and the almost tactile realism of the individual episodes keep all this from becoming a trite coming-of-age narrative, even as the film explores what was emerging as one of the central late-soviet social issues: finding a balance between private fulfillment and public responsibility in a society where surveillance had been taken for granted.

These engaging stories of cautious, youthful self-discovery are unexpectedly interrupted about half-way through the film, when the camera zeros in on a tear-away calendar marked June 22, the date in 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. I don’t know how contemporary Soviet viewers perceived the film up until this point, but for me, its resolutely present and future orientation had obscured what now becomes obvious: that the twenty-somethings we’ve been hanging out with were members of the first generation to come of age after the war. Their search for purpose suddenly no longer seems purely ideological, materialistic, or individual. They are, in fact, each shadowed by the devastation of war-time loss even as the richness of their everyday experiences seems to have put the war behind them.

As in so many other Soviet films of this period, the older, war-scarred generation has no useful guidance for them in the new, freer, comparatively luxurious post-war world. The young adults are suspended between past and future, but in this brave new world, they are on their own. (The absence of a wise advisor, a stand-in for the Communist Party and a staple of Stalinist films and novels, infuriated censors and caused the film to be shelved for four years).

Margarita Pilikhina’s stunning cinematography brings us close to these characters and their world of youthful pleasure, anxiety, and growing disillusionment. Her camerawork is primarily responsible for the intimacy we feel and the empathy we develop. I am Twenty is a beautifully lighted film. Indoors and out, in the glare of sunlit streets and the shadows of workplaces and apartments, the black-and-white photography is a palette of luminous shades of gray. The soft lighting, however, is neither sentimental nor nostalgic; it conveys the characters’ sense of being suspended in time, between an unthinkable past and not quite imaginable future.

At the same time, the camera is exceptionally mobile: moving constantly, careening through streets and circling around, soaring above, and zooming in on people. The tension between suspension and motion embodies the young people’s inner conflicts and perfectly captures the hope and disbelief –and growing cynicism–that characterized this period in Russian history.

In my view, I am Twenty is the best Russian film of the period. Admirers of more well known directors like Andrei Tarkovsky will undoubtedly disagree, but in I am Twenty, Khutsiev succeeds in creating a fully realized world and plumbing the depths of human experience, not in some fantastical, imagined situation, but in the most ordinary everyday.

Cynical Realism: Miller’s Crossing by Joel and Ethan Coen (1990)

By Ben Breen

The HBO series Boardwalk Empire may currently be winning laurels for its workmanlike depiction of Prohibition-era gangsters and corrupt politicos, but viewers interested in a more fully-realized work about the Golden Age of American organized crime would be wise to turn to the Coen Brother’s 1990 masterpiece Miller’s Crossing.

This film centers on the attempts of an Irish-American mob underboss in 1920s Chicago, played by Gabriel Byrne, to collect on a gambling debt from an unsavory bookie named Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro, in a riveting and unnerving performance), while he navigates a love triangle between himself, Bernbaum’s sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) and his mentor, an aging mob boss played with memorable vigor by Albert Finney. Yet the real appeal of Miller’s Crossing lies not in its convoluted plot, but in its evocative depiction of the distinctive visual style and underworld cant of 1920s Chicago. In a lesser film, the screenplay’s clutter of long-forgotten slang (“now take your flunky and dangle”) might come off as stilted or mannered, but here it seems natural: these are real characters, living real lives in a bygone urban America that is both foreign and familiar.

Miller’s Crossing was loosely based on Dashiell Hammet’s classic 1931 potboiler The Glass Key, but the Coens allow their spectacular ensemble cast to take what could have been a formulaic tale of double-crosses and gang warfare in a highly original direction

– despite nods to classic film noir like Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). Gabriel Byrne, as the brilliant but self-defeating mob lieutenant Tom Reagan, is the anchor of Miller’s Crossing, and the ethical dilemmas he faces in the film function as stand-ins for the larger moral ambiguities embedded in the ambitious and individualistic mindset of America in the twentieth (and twenty-first) centuries. Byrne’s Tom is a cynical realist who prides himself on his ability to “know the angles” and avoid allowing his conscience to get in the way of business opportunities. Yet at the same time, it is Tom’s aversion to violence — at least when he is forced to perform it himself, at close quarters — that sets in motion the film’s main events. Can criminals maintain a moral compass? And what separates a criminal from a businessman or politician, if all three place rational self-interest above personal ethics?

The Coens, who both wrote and directed the film, are wise to leave the answers to these questions up to the viewer. But Gabriel Byrne and the brilliant ensemble cast that support him are much more than gangster-movie cliches: like Tony Soprano, they are unsettling precisely because they are so familiar, such typical products of an American society that mingles cold-blooded acquisitiveness and violence with a sincere streak of idealism and a desire to do right. The French novelist Stendahl wrote that “a novel is a mirror carried along the highway.” Miller’s Crossing causes us to see criminals not as clichés or villains, but as reflections in that mirror.

The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba

By Frank A. Guridy

The forces that created the Cuban Revolution often get lost in polarizing debates about Castro’s Cuba. Two very different films highlight the changes that ripped through Cuban society in the 1950s and early 1960s and created the Cuban Revolution. The first is Tomás Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo) released in Cuba in 1968 and the second is Steven Soderbergh’s 2008 Hollywood biopic Che.

Memories of Underdevelopment, based on Edmundo Desnoes’s 1967 novel, is perhaps the best-known film in Gutiérrez’s long and productive career. The film dramatizes the forces rapidly transforming Cuban society in the early years of the Cuban Revolution through the eyes of Sergio (skillfully played by Sergio Corrieri), a member of the old Cuban elite that was overthrown by the revolution. Sergio is a frustrated intellectual who, unlike his elite and middle-class contemporaries, decides to stay in Cuba rather than flee to the United States. In Gutierrez’s masterful depiction of Sergio, made evident in the scenes of the coat and tie wearing Sergio aimlessly wandering the streets of Havana, one sees the rapid decline of an older civilian model of Cuban masculinity, one that was predicated on affluence, consumption, and affiliation with the United States, as well as sexual predatory “machismo.” Sergio is in many ways a prototypical “ladies man” who manifests his own alienation by preying upon young women. Yet, Corrieri’s performance evokes sympathy for a character who is lost, yet, keenly aware of the changes that are happening all around him.

Steven Soderbergh’s Che can be read as a completely different meditation on Cuban manhood. While ostensibly about Ernesto “Che” Guevara, one of the revolution’s key leaders, the film also explores the emergence of the “new man” of 1950s-60s Cuba, the new socialist individual that Guevara hoped to create in the Cuban Revolution. Soderbergh’s lengthy 4-hour movie is divided into two parts: the first portrays Che’s involvement in the guerrilla war against Cuba ruler Fulgencio Batista and the second explores his ill-fated guerrilla campaign in 1967 in Bolivia. Unlike Sergio, who relishes his class privilege, Che (brilliantly played by Benicio del Toro) is a selfless doctor who rejects the benefits of bourgeois existence to devote his entire life to becoming a career revolutionary motivated by “profound feelings of love,” as Che himself put it. Soderbergh’s depictions of Che’s encounters with Cuban peasants, his tending to wounded soldiers, and his fearlessness as a commanding officer in the guerrilla war underscore the model of revolutionary masculinity celebrated by the triumphant Cuban Revolution. While many have criticized the film’s glossing over of Guevara’s involvement in the execution of counter-revolutionaries, viewers who do not give the film a chance will miss an opportunity to gain insights into the factors that explain the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

Both films satisfy the historian’s desire for accurate representations of the past. Memories gives us a taste of 1960s Cuba not only because it was made at the time, but also due to Gutiérrez’s skillful insertion of archival footage throughout the film. Soderbergh’s beautiful costume and set design, most evident in his attentiveness to the architecture of Cuban provincial towns in the decisive scenes of the Battle of Santa Clara, show that the film was based on solid research. One may quibble with each director’s political choices, but both films are brilliantly executed and provide valuable portrayals of monumental events in Cuban history. Each highlights, in different ways, competing models of Cuban male identity that are in tension with each other to this day.

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