A Summer to Remember

Grownups are always trying to translate the world of children into terms that make sense in their adult world. It's tricky business; for they often wax exceedingly sentimental in the process. Even the most sympathetic attempt at understanding a child's viewpoint must always be a projection of some kind of adult mystique of childhood. And this can so easily degenerate into triteness.

A Summer to Remember is such an attempt--and to some extent such a failure. But despite occasional moments of sentimentality, sequences of conventional childish pranks, and stock characters like fat, cruel aunts and foolish uncles, the movie is a sensitive and poignant expression of a little boy's dreams and frustrations. With an oddly appealing combination of keen insight and good, old-fashioned corn, it explores his reactions to the changes in his life during one summer.

Seryozha's summer is a tense one. His mother marries and he finds he must now share her love with another person. The new stepfather understands and works hard to win the affection of Seryozha; and at the end of the summer the two have grown to love each other. But by that time, a baby brother has been born, and a whole new series of emotional readjustments must be made. When the stepfather is temporarily transferred to work on a different collective farm, his parents decide to leave Seryozha behind for the winter to recover from an illness; the bottom falls out of the boy's new happiness. And as they have decided to take the baby along, the substance of Seryozha's new doubts seem to become crushing realities. Finally the parents relent and take him with them; but not before Seryozha has suffered great disappointments.

In his relationships with other children and adults who are not relatives, in his reactions to their problems and peculiarities, Seryozha demonstrates his own view of life in general, and adults in particular. And the experiences of the two older boys he constantly follows around mirror both his fears and ambitions.

These attitudes are for the most part expressed visually. A solemn procession of little kids, including Seryozha, watch an older friend unconsciously immitate the mannerisms of his sailor uncle, whose bearing, imagined adventures and magnificent tatoos they all worship. The camera follows the delinquent escapades of Seryozha and his friends with the eye of a fellow child. Fast action and disaster, hasty exits and final parental retribution. Seryozha's loneliness during the first few weeks of his mother's marriage isolates him from the rest of the children: he is shown on the fringe of groups, always a little absent from their activities, dramatizing his loneliness.

Russian movies in the heyday of Eisenstein, Podovkin, and Dubshenko were aesthetic masterpieces. Each single shot would have made a still photograph magnificent in its own right. But the beauty of these films is so striking that it is occasionally distracting. At some point between then and now, the Russians learned to use the aesthetic genius of the early movies in a more natural way, without degenerating into the general conventionality of Soviet painting, or the sterility of most of socialist realism. A Summer to Remember includes its quota of trite sequences, but for the most part it uses inspired photographic imagery to express believably the feelings and imagination of a charming little boy.