Paper Soldier

If Khrushchev had read Chekhov, the main character would have been caught between them. A frequently used theme in Russian art, the many times used theme of useless people gnawing at the soul of Russian intelligence, is once again unfolding within a character who is simultaneously caught between Moscow and Kazakhstan in 1961. The film is also a great exploration of the life of a fictional character and the time period - the short period between the fall of the Stalinist regime and the complete emptying of the socialist values of late Brezhnevism was a time when the Union and its citizens truly aimed for the stars. Communism could still be a reachable dream - after all, the Russian man, the son of a semi-literate peasant, was preparing to be the first to conquer space. Those who wanted to could still believe. Wouldn't this belief - perhaps naive at the time - be more pure, sincere, and real than the classic intellectual skepticism, egocentrism, and careerism? The main character is torn in his private life (with the values of bourgeois intellect represented by his wife), in relation to his ancestors (the correlate of his bourgeois wife is his parents from the intellectual class, killed in Stalin's labor camp), and towards his friends (emigration). Aleksey German Jr. managed to embody this dilemma even in the mise-en-scène - is it possible to believe that an epochal event can emerge from this typically Russian disintegrating mess, where something is constantly being ruined, something is not working, evocatively captured in the murky space of the cosmodrome? German Jr. completely benefits from his father's work in terms of form - the use of framing, depth of field, and mise-en-scène - it's visually stunning. Furthermore, it's commendable that, like his father, he strives to humanize events that could easily fall into grandiose fresco-like representations (WWII, Stalinism, here Gagarin). (16/10/2015)