Zhila-byla Odna Baba

2011, Russia
("Once there was a simple woman")

This film asks the question, "What was it like to be a Russian peasant woman in the Tambov region between 1909 and 1921?" and answers by showing that it sucked worse than just about anything else has ever sucked in human existence. In that time of troubles, Russia went through WW1, the overthrow of the Tsar, the Soviet-Polish war, and several years of civil war. The era was even more violent in the Tambov region, because the locals counter-revolted against the Bolsheviks, who then suppressed them mercilessly. The Bolsheviks' barbaric response to the Tambov Rebellion was a favorite subject of Solzhenitsyn.

Even when the villages were relatively unscathed by fighting, a woman's life could be an unremitting hell in those days. Married to a drunk, beaten, whipped, raped at the pleasure of her husband and his family, the "simple woman" in the film was a virtual slave. Life was miserable in summer, unbearable in winter. If she thought her existence couldn't get any worse, she was wrong. When the soldiers came, her life was pretty much non-stop rape, except for the occasional break for a beating or some starvation or the deaths of her children or for her home and village to be burned down.

And those were the good times.

In the film's climax, an entire village is destroyed by a flood.

This is pretty much the most depressing existence you will ever see on film. And - get this - the Russian Wikipedia page says (translated), "According to historians, the events in the film have a documentary basis, although in reality it was even worse." In other words, this film gave us the sugar-coated version of her existence. It's difficult for us in America to imagine how much worse it could have been.

Writer/director Andrey Smirnov spent a good part of his adult life creating this 2011 film. His previous film came out in 1979, and he worked on this one intermittently from 1987 onward. He did a vast amount of research on the Tambov region of Russia, having visited the region several times to study the customs, culture and dialect of the local Mordva-Moksha people, a distinct ethnic group. He shot the entire film on location in the actual area where the action took place, but didn't take off the lens caps until he had made the principal actors live in the area long enough to learn to mimic the speech of the locals. One of the actors, who did not speak English, recalled that he once had to perform a role phonetically in English, and found that easier than performing in the local Tambov dialect, which is barely comprehensible to a speaker of standard Russian.

The director himself said, "Я думаю, это кино не для Запада." ("I don't think this film is for the West.") I'd say he's nailed that one, in the sense that Western audiences generally seek some elements of entertainment as the sweet juice necessary to swallow the bitter pill of an unpleasant history lesson. This film offers only the pill. I can't speak for the entire West, but I can say, "Я думаю, это кино не для меня."("It sure ain't for me, sparky.") I never got inured to the brutality in the film. Let me be blunt. It's an unpleasant and uncomfortable film to watch, and I wasn't especially interested in the obscure Tambov Rebellion in the first place. On the other hand, I was fascinated by the historically accurate portrayal of village life, especially of a wedding ceremony and the accompanying celebration. The cinematography in this film is dazzling, so the film may be fascinating if you want to learn about the customs and costumes of one part of rural Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, as portrayed by a man who spent a quarter of a century researching the details.

Nudity:

Darya Yekamasova spent much of the film naked. I took these 1920x1080 clips directly from the Russian Blu-Ray. This is my first attempt to capture directly from a Blu-Ray since the earliest days of that medium, and the results seem to be satisfactory.

A Dangerous Method

2011

(Notes only. Films clips in yesterday's page)

A Dangerous Method is a portrayal of the relationships among four pioneers in psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sabina Spielrein, and Otto Gross.

In a nutshell, here's how they interacted in real life:

Speilrein was a rich, troubled teenager who was sent to Jung's clinic in Zurich by her family, who could not longer control her seizures at home. Jung took on her case personally and decided to use Freud's new technique of "talking therapy." Speilrein's problems stemmed from the fact that her father spanked her naked body and that she took pleasure from it, often masturbating afterwards. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Speilrein had been raised in a sheltered environment and did not understand the actual nature of sexual contact. Speilrein could not understand or accept her own sexual response to bering punished by her father, and apparently turned her guilt into external manifestations of apparent madness. Jung was successful in bringing Speilrein into a controlled state of mind, but in the process became attracted to her.

Soon after taking the Speilrein case, Jung traveled to Vienna to meet Freud himself. Among other things in their original 13-hour discussion, the two geniuses touched upon Speilrein's treatment. The two men formed an instant friendship. Freud was so impressed with Jung's clinical skills that he sent him one of his own patients, a fellow therapist named Otto Gross. In the course of the Gross-Jung discussions, the free-thinking and uninhibited Gross planted in Jung's mind the idea that it would not be such a bad idea to have sex with a patient like Miss Speilrein. It was not so much later that Jung would be deflowering his patient, which began a seven-year affair, followed by another nine years of correspondence.

This relationship was obviously a breach of patient-doctor trust, not to mention a real danger to Jung's marriage to a refined and rich woman. Jung first tried to justify his misbehavior to Freud by portraying Speilrein as his seductress. Freud then wrote to Speilrein to chastise her. Speilrein was outraged and demanded that Jung write back to Freud and explain in detail how they really came to be lovers. Jung eventually clarified the situation to Freud, and the three of them continued to interact for many years, during which time Speilrein herself became a psychoanalyst. Many people say that Freud and Jung began their friendship over Speilrein, and ended it the same way. Others say that the Speilrein case started their rift, but the men really split because Freud was appalled by the non-scientific side of Jung's personality, which led him into alchemy, spirituality, ESP, Eastern mysticism, and astrology. Still others say that their break was merely professional, based upon Freud's unwillingness to accept Jung as an equal who diverged in many places from Freud's principles.

All of the above is portrayed with more or less scrupulous accuracy in the film, based upon the historical evidence, especially various letters exchanged by the principals. Where the film gets off into the world of imagination is in picturing the exact nature of the sexual relations between Jung (Michael Fassbinder) and Speilrein (Keira Knightley). The following portions of the film's plot are NOT justified by historical sources:

Since Speilrein experienced pleasure from being humiliated, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) counseled Jung to pleasure her by "thrashing her within an inch of her life, as she clearly wants." Jung eventually did just that, giving Speilrein pleasure by whipping her buttocks. When a guilty Jung, a practicing Catholic, tried to break off the relationship, Speilrein persuaded him to stay with her by suggesting that he analyze his own sexual needs and determine which of those could not be satisfied by his wife. Since Jung obviously took pleasure in the sadistic part of the S&M relationship with Speilrein, and could not bring himself to suggest anything similar to his beloved and dignified wife, the sessions with Speilrein were deemed essential to his own sexual satisfaction. The Jung-Speilrein spanking sessions are portrayed in some fairly graphic detail on screen. While Keira Knightley's bare bum is never actually seen on camera, her breasts are bare in these sessions, and her facial expressions show her becoming intensely aroused by the humiliation.

The on-camera spankings may sound sensational to you, especially since nobody knows what the Jung/Speilrein relationship really consisted of, but I was grateful for those moments, which supplied the only life in the film, except for the very brief appearance of Cassel as the weaselly wastrel Otto Gross. The rest of the film is based on a dry, dense non-fiction tome called "A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung Freud and Sabrina Speilrein," and basically is an accurate account of historical figures reading one another's letters aloud or discussing complex clinical theories in small, dark rooms.

There was one major outdoor scene, and it provided my favorite scene in the film, the only scene which indicated that anyone associated with the film had a sense of humor or could tell a story with images rather than words. Jung takes Freud out for a sail. Jung looks like any sailor at sea, ruggedly working his sail and his rudder, occasionally making a statement in a voice loud enough to be heard over the wind by a man several feet away. Freud, on the other hand, sits awkwardly and stiffly on the deck as he tries to have a serious conversation in a controlled indoor voice. Freud holds a walking stick in one hand, and wears a hamburg. As the camera assumes Jung's vantage point, we can only see Freud's head and shoulders. His low position within the boat and his inappropriate attire make Freud look for all the world like Toulouse Lautrec. For all Freud seems to know, he might just as well be in his office or a Viennese cafe, except that the floor is moving and things seem to be moist and windy around him. Freud, who spent an entire life studying the nature of pleasure, seems incapable of feeling any himself.

This correlates well with another scene in which the profligate Otto Gross speculates that the only reason Freud thinks about sex so much is that he isn't getting laid.

Analyze THAT, shrink-boy.