My Friend Ivan Lapshin

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My Friend Ivan Lapshin
My Friend Ivan Lapshin.jpg
Directed byAleksei German
Screenplay byEduard Volodarsky
Based on
by Yuri German
Produced byLenfilm
StarringAndrei Boltnev
Nina Ruslanova
Andrei Mironov
Aleksei Zharkov
Cinematography
Edited by
Music by
Release date
  • 1985 (1985)
Running time
100 minutes
CountrySoviet Union
LanguageRussian

My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Russian: Мой друг Иван Лапшин, romanized: Moy drug Ivan Lapshin) is a 1985 Soviet crime drama directed by Aleksei German and produced by Lenfilm, based on a novel by Yuri German adapted by Eduard Volodarsky. It was narrated by .

Background[]

In March 1985, Mikhail “Gorby” Gorbachev, was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev opened the country to Western influence with his reforms “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring). The Filmmakers Union, the most liberal creative organization at the time, was the first to support Gorbachev. The glasnost’ period became distinguished by the rediscovery of cinematic hidden gems, the censored films, which were officially known for Stagnation-era artistic talents. These films informed the history of Soviet cinema. The glasnost' and perestroika films also depicted modern social and economic deterioration, the loss of ideals, and disillusionment in Communist ideologies.[1]

Plot[]

Set in 1935 in the fictional provincial town of Unchansk (filmed in Astrakhan),[2] the film is presented as the recollections of a man who at the time was a nine-year-old boy living with his father in a communal flat shared with criminal police investigator Ivan Lapshin and a number of other characters. The film begins at Lapshin’s 40th birthday celebration. Babooshka Patrikeyevan serves food, cleans, and grumbles over sugar consumption. Later in the film, Vasili Okoshkin mentions leaving with Lapshin for the gold fields. In another scene, Lapshin confronts newcomers in the town square and scares off a horse-driven cart trafficking stolen firewood. There are several other plot strands: a provincial troupe of actors arrive and put on a play without much success; a friend of Lapshin's, the journalist Khanin, shows up, depressed after his wife's death, who attempts to commit suicide. He later joins Lapshin’s communal home. Lapshin investigates the Solovyov gang of criminals. Lapshin falls in love with the actress Natasha Adashova, but she is in love with Khanin. Lapshin is turned down by Natasha, and later recuperates after suffering a bullet wound. It is "a film about people 'building socialism' on a bleak frozen plain, their town's one street a long straggle of low wooden buildings beneath a huge white sky, leading from the elegant stucco square by the river's quayside out into wilderness".

Themes[]

A central theme in the film is nostalgia. The film switches between black and white and color to accentuate the feeling of nostalgia. The scattered and de-centered narrative structure emulates a dream-like recollection of memories, underscoring the fragility of memory. Another theme is carnival. The carnivalesque rhythm is apparent in the scenes of plays as well as in the festive tone of scenes taking place in the communal house. In this way, the film is a meta-dramatic and surreal. The film also plays with an edge of realism; there are series of shots of ordinary people living their ordinary lives. Moreover, there is theme of idealism: Lapshin exclaims, "We'll clear the land of scum and build an orchard."

Reception[]

According to Tony Wood,

These are people whose faith in the future remains intact, but whose betrayal is imminent. German has said that his main aim was to convey a sense of the period, to depict as faithfully as possible the material conditions and human preoccupations of Soviet Russia on the eve of the Great Purge. It is for this world, for these people that the narrator struggles to declare his love—unconditional, knowing how flawed that world was, and how tainted the future would be. German compared the film to the work of Chekhov, and one can see in it a similar tenderness for the suffering and absurdity of its characters.[3]

IMDB Review: "A small-town man lives a normal homelife where he puts on appearances of respectability for his family and friends, but at work he's a brutal KGB enforcer. My Friend Ivan Lapshin is heavily reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror - half-memories told as a series of random disjointed vignets, in both black-&-white and in color, with very loose handheld camerawork lending it a naturalness easy to get lost in. Unfortunately, that's also a crutch. I couldn't help but keep comparing it to the Mirror the entire time I was watching the movie; albeit Ivan Lapshin's a very solid imitation, pretty damn good in its own right. Let's call this one a slightly overshadowed companion piece to Tarkovsky."[4]

Walter Goodman (New York Times): "Beneath the camouflage of the look of time past, Ivan is makeshift melodrama."[citation needed]

Laura Clifford (Reeling Reviews), "The film is challenging, German playing with time, film stocks and shooting styles, his cinema fractured to give the abstract impression of distant memories...once what German's trying to do sinks in, Lapshin becomes a potent symbol of the Stalinist era."[citation needed]

Ángel Fernández-Santos (El Pais (Spain)), "A beautiful and complex film. [Full Review in Spanish]"[citation needed]

Jeremy Heilman (MovieMartyr.com): "As "fifty years and five blocks" would imply, memory is viewed here as something slippery; almost tangible yet just out of reach."[5]

New York Times article: “Scene after scene, shot for the most part in the sepia of old photographs, catches the poverty and confusion of a hard time - the crowded apartment, the beat-up cars, the dreary town and its shabbily dressed people, the outbursts of desperation and nuttiness.” “In his treatment of a troupe of actors and some musicians jangling along on a flag-festooned little trolley, the director seems to have picked up some tricks from Fellini, but the spirit is very different.” “‘'We'll clear the land of scum and build an orchard’' - was taken by the Kremlin as a dangerous piece of irony.”[6]

Production[]

  • My Friend Ivan Lapshin was filmed in Astrakhan, Russia, in 1983. The film was produced by Lenfilm Studio and Pervoe Tvorcheskoe Obedinenie.[7]
  • Budget: $8,000,000 (estimated)[8]

Distributors include:

Technical Specifications[]

  • Runtime: 1 hr 40 min (100 min)
  • Sound: Mix Mono
  • Color: Black and White | Color
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.37 : 1
  • Laboratory: Lenfilm, Leningrad, Soviet Union
  • Film Length: 2,719 m (Sweden)
  • Negative Format: 35 mm
  • Cinematographic Process: Spherical
  • Printed Film Format: 35 mm [10]

Awards[]

Locarno International Film Festival 1986 - Winner of the Ernest Artaria Award[11]

Trivia[]

  • The 'Urka' (Criminal) personage who stabbed Khanin and then later shot and killed by Ivan Lapshin was played by not a professional actor, but by a real criminal. Aleksey German made this decision to add more realism to these scenes.
  • This film was shot in the early 1980s, but was not released until the perestroika reforms because it took an ironic look at Soviet idealism.
  • Nikolay Gubenko auditioned for the role of Ivan Lapshin. Yet the director chose to work with Andrei Boltnev because "there was some sort of "doomed" quality about him - it was clear he'd be shot and killed".
  • Shot in 1983, this movie was released only in 1985.[12]
  • The film was based on novellas written by the director Aleksei German's father Iurii P. German (1910-1967)[13]

Cast[]

References[]

  1. ^ Vida Johnson and Elena Stishova, Perestroika and Post-Soviet Cinema 1985–2000s Academic Studies Press (2013)
  2. ^ Condee, Nancy (8 April 2009). The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190451226 – via Google Books.
  3. ^ Tony Wood, "Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German," New Left Review 7, Jan.-Feb. 2001.
  4. ^ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084345/?ref_=ttmc_mc_tt
  5. ^ https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/moy-drug-ivan-lapshin
  6. ^ https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/24/movies/new-directors-new-films-my-friend-ivan-lapshin.html
  7. ^ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084345/companycredits?ref_=ttspec_sa_4
  8. ^ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084345/
  9. ^ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084345/companycredits?ref_=ttloc_sa_4
  10. ^ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084345/technical?ref_=ttco_sa_5
  11. ^ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084345/awards?ref_=ttco_ql_op_1
  12. ^ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084345/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
  13. ^ Rifkin, Benjamin (1992). "The Reinterpretation of History in German's Film My Friend Ivan Lapshin: Shifts in Center and Periphery". Slavic Review. 51 (3): 431–447. doi:10.2307/2500053. JSTOR 2500053.

External links[]

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