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Sergei Parajanov doesn't dawdle, he kicks off his cosmos of folkloric images already in the color sequences of Ivan the Terrible, Part Two and keeps accelerating. The Carpathian Mountains ("forgotten by God and people") set the stage, Hutsul tribes at the crossroads of religion and paganism—a "Christmas" title card yields to a procession of baroquely masked villagers (warrior, bear, Reaper) marching toward the camera. "There's no evil spirit in church... There's a Satan among people." The patriarchs go at it with axes, the lenses are drenched in spurting crimson as the fatal blow is dealt. The dead man's son (Ivan Mykolaichuk) and the slayer's daughter (Larisa Kadochnikova) are childhood sweethearts, plead eternal love, are separated. A sparkling star is painted onto the celluloid to connect the lovers, his grief in the wake of her drowning drains the colors from the screen (cp. A Matter of Life and Death). The woman he eventually marries (Tatyana Bestayeva), a landowner and sometime-witch, surrenders herself to the local sorcerer (Spartak Bagashvily) after he quells a storm, a tilt up from their embrace finds a tree on a hilltop struck by lightning. "A poetic drama" for Kotsiubynsky's centennial, a Mamoulianesque camera that sweeps high enough to take a tumbling trunk's POV as it flattens a character and low enough for a daisy to block the sun. The world alternates between blanket of snow and enchanted garden, chorales and pan-flute kolyadkas and the elephant shrieks of long trumpets add to the elated cacophony. A duet between realms reunites the couple: "When we fell in love, even dry oaks blossomed. When we parted the lilacs withered..." Parajanov's cinema is an artisanal art, a thousand Byzantine wonders fill the screen, myth and fabrics and immemorial delirium, it's like experiencing the medium with virgin eyes (children peek through a window in the closing shot). Cinematography by Yuri Ilyenko.
--- Fernando F. Croce |