Lou posted:
>"There Was a Lad" is a deceptively modest film. Filmed in a radiant
>black-and-white on location in the rural Russia of 1964, it tracks the
>day-to-day existence of a young truck driver Pavel Kolokolnikov (Leonid
>Kuravlev), whose only dream is to rise above his mundane existence. But it
>is not money that he hungers for, rather entry into the world of "culture",
>especially as expressed in the women of his dreams.
<snip>
>Ultimately Pavel is a prisoner of his dreams. Whether behind the wheel of
>his truck or in a hospital bed recovering from injuries incurred in a
>heroic act, he fantasizes about a more perfect world where he is garbed in
>white in a petal-strewn forest receiving the affections of the town
>librarian. Or he dreams that he is a General bedecked in ribbons delivering
>inspirational speeches to all the women he has ever known, who are
>recovering in a hospital ward. Their problem? It is their "heart", which is
>just another way of saying that he is projecting his own romantic
>frustrations onto the opposite sex. Such scenes are rendered in a
>surprising Fellini-esque fashion.
_There Was a Lad_ sounds like a wonderful film, which gives a subtly
feminist criticism of male anxiety about "cultured women" as well as
of metaphorical representation of "culture" as "feminine" (since I
haven't had a chance to see the movie, I'm going by Lou's
description), in addition to an examination of alienation rooted in
the separation of mental & manual labor which actually existing
socialism was never able to overcome.
Yoshie
