And Quiet Flows the Don

The Brattle's offering this week is a good old-fashioned shoot 'em up, Russian style. And Quiet Flows the Don has all the cowboy accoutrements: fistfights, whippings, sex (diluted), cossack cavalry charges, and even an attempted suicide with a three-foot scythe blade. With these it combines the usual Soviet trappings: oppressed peasants, oppressive nobles, and oppressingly nationalistic shots of women out in the fields raking hay. But like the suicide attempt, which ends up cutting a tendon instead of the jugular vein, the movie is rather anti-climactic, despite the imitation-Hollywood splendor. No one is surprised when the peasants decide that Marx was right. No one is shocked, though many shudder, when the male lead struggles home to a hero's welcome after the wars.

Besides being anti-climactic, the movie is confusing. And Quiet Flows the Don plays heavily on the relationship, and differences, between love, sex, and marriage and the problems resulting when the three get out of phase with each other. The main source of confusion is that the movie jumps back and forth between two concepts of what makes a sound marriage--romantic love in the best modern sense of overcoming all obstacles, or carefully planned agreements by the parents of both families. Throughout the film, director Sergei Gerasimov refrains from telling us which method he thinks works better. At the end, he makes his opinion clear, but not his reasons.

The movie's hero, a cossack peasant named Grigori, tries romantic love first; the obstacle is that the girl is alreade married. Grigori's father decides that this intrigue is dishonoring the family name, and to break it up he arranges for his son to marry another local girl, Natalya. Grigori spends the rest of the movie vacillating between the two.

He ends up with Natalya, who has followed him around with an unconvincing, melancholy adoration ever since the first unhappy days of their marriage. That she will be happy with him seems reasonable enough, but that he is in love with her, which the filming tries vainly to suggest, is just too much. He has made it too clear that he was only sorry for her in the week or two their marriage lasted. He has spent too many years in a state verging on contentment with his peasant mistress. Gerasimov's treatment of the final scenes is aimed at portraying an enlightened man undoing past mistakes. What comes out is a picture of a man, like a rat, hopping between sinking ships. He is no homecoming hero at all. He is still Grigori, and everyone in the audience knows it.

What sparks of greatness Grigori does show come when he is spearing Germans from horseback in a battle attributed to the first World War, or else beating up a noble who has seduced one of his women. But killing Germans is more or less irrelevant to the movie's main themes--the rise of the peasants and the love life of Grigori--and the attack on the noble comes as a decidedly un-subtle conclusion to decidedly un-subtle presentation of the peasant-noble business. Perhaps the worst incident along this line was the first: the entrance of the party member who is to bring this village into the fold. He is, of all things, a carpenter.