Women in Soviet Film by Marina Rojavin Tim Harte

Author:Marina Rojavin, Tim Harte [Marina Rojavin, Tim Harte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367889715
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Melodrama and the city

Urban spaces acquire particular significance in such melodramas as One More Time about Love and A City Romance. Not only do cinematic cityscapes indicate the place and period of the action, but they also contribute to the plot and character development in the two films while enhancing affective responses from spectators. Both films take place in Moscow (even though they were filmed in the South: One More Time about Love in Sochi and A City Romance in Odessa), where the protagonists live and work. The opening sequence of One More Time about Love shows Moscow at night with city lights reflected in the river, dark skies lit up by a myriad of streetlights and cars with their lights on racing along the vast avenues of the capital. The city itself emanates light, attracts gazes, and is no less an object of desire than the main character of the movie, the beautiful flight attendant Natasha. Besides providing a certain degree of privacy that couples can enjoy in a big metropolis, Moscow seems to offer ample opportunity for young people to meet each other. Natasha and Evdokimov meet at a restaurant late at night, where she has come alone in a famished state after a long flight, while he has come with his friends, whom he quickly abandons to pursue Natasha. Later on, it turns out that they had met even earlier, at a museum where Natasha attended a talk delivered by Evdokimov, a widely respected physicist. Both main characters navigate the intense dynamism of Russia’s capital with a significant degree of confidence and comfort. They both exemplify a new generation of Muscovites: young professionals, independent individuals, enjoying an urban life style.

Unlike One More Time about Love with its early establishing shot of the Kremlin embankment, most of A City Romance’s action takes place on the outskirts of Moscow, in one of the so-called “bedroom communities” (spal’nye raiony), architecturally uninteresting neighborhoods quickly developed under Brezhnev to provide accommodations for urban dwellers in large Soviet cities. Panoramic shots of the neighborhood show identical residential buildings; these new developments made it possible for people to have their own apartments, although they were small and of poor quality. Instead of sometimes glorifying, sometimes critiquing communal living as was done in earlier Soviet movies, late thaw cinema, particularly melodrama, explores these private spaces of urban domesticity.8 Domestic space in both One More Time about Love and A City Romance is organized by gender: while the men have their own private apartments, the women cohabit with others either permanently (in a dorm, in the case of Masha in A City Romance), or temporarily (in the case of Natasha, who rents out a room in an apartment and later on in One More Time about Love must seek out new lodgings). Neither of the films shows the heroine’s home, while the male protagonists’ apartments are prominently featured. Female protagonists in these melodramas find themselves displaced from the traditionally woman-dominated locus of home. Instead of the

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