CaptEcco

BLUE MOUNTAINS, OR AN IMPROBABLE STORY ("Why two titles?") is an absurdist tale in which a novelist takes his latest manuscript to his familiar publishing house, only to have it pushed aside, lost, damaged, stolen, or simply ignored again and again as the employees go about their meaningless, repetitive work. Things start out fairly normal and get gradually stranger as the story continues. As film satires go it's not quite as cunning as Bunuel's best work (which it seems it could have been influenced by) but it's still a funny, sharp and brutally honest jab at the crumbling Soviet government and bureaucratic ineptness in all its forms. Ramaz Giorgobiani's expressionless lead performance is an interesting and eventually necessary realist counterpoint to the often wild and intentionally bloated performances of the bureaucrats. The aforementioned Bunuel is an obvious cinematic connection, as is Fellini's ORCHESTRA REHEARSAL, but as I was watching it I kept thinking this is what might happen if Preston Sturges filmed a Kafka story. Well worth a look.

CHEMI BEBIA (MY GRANDMOTHER) is a Georgian avant-garde slapstick silent comedy that was banned in the Soviet Union for almost 50 years. And it's pretty easy to see why. Whereas later Georgian filmmakers became rather adept at slipping political criticism under the noses of the Soviet censors, this film ends with a completely unambiguous rallying call for the death of bureaucrats. Lots of the creative techniques one associates with early Soviet cinema are on display here, but they are filtered through a sieve of early American slapstick and used mostly (and most successfully) for comedy. Imagine Harold Lloyd starring in Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL and you'll start to get an idea of what MY GRANDMOTHER is like. It's hilarious, and historically it's interesting to watch in that it's just as politically obvious as any other early Soviet film, but in an entirely different way.