Lileya

The Brattle has moved within the Iron Curtain this week in its search for the bizarre, the artistic, and the foreign. The result is a collection of three Soviet films, one with subtitles and two, including the feature, with dubbed narration and native music.

Leading the playbill is a performance of the ballet Lileya by the Kiev State Opera Company. If you don't listen to the amusingly propagandist narration, or pay too much attention to the equally amusing, equally nationalistic plot, and are not bothered by the rough edges of some of the Russian camera techniques, the dancing and the music are probably worth your last evening before Christmas vacation.

The gist of Lileya is a love affair between a young serf and a young serfess during some sort of mid-summer's eve celebration. A fat, dissolute, and probably capitalistic robber baron starts the plot rolling by breaking up the festivities, and then deciding that he wants young Lileya as his scullery maid. Serf Stephen runs away to join the "free" (naturally) Cossacks, and Lileya hides in a broken-down water mill.

In true worker fashion, however, Stephen returns to rouse up the local peasants and overthrow the terrified baron. Somewhat embittered by the burning of his castle, the noble shoots Lileya (in the back), only to be stabbed by Stephen's henchmen. The movie closes with a shot of Stephen looking Byronic on the top of a hill.

When the Russians produce something for foreign consumption, the standards are generally high. Lileya's photography is no exception, except for a few of those disconcerting moments when film splices cause things that have been a dusky yellow to become suddenly spotless white. Now and then it is overdone, as in the opening time-sequence shot of a flower blossoming (time sequences were invented by Walt Disnovsky in the early 1900's), but the general effect is moving.

The music is more than good, and the dances heralding the arrival of a gypsy troupe are exceptionally lively, rhythmic, and pleasing. The choreography is well-done, and the costuming as successful as it always is when you dress people up in foreign-looking attire. An hour and a half is a lot of ballet, at least in the movies, but it is not too much.

The two shorts are both entertaining, and equally nationalistic. In one, a resume of a skating competition, Russian athletes obligingly sweep first and second in every event, beating out, among others, a Hungarian and a representative of the German "Free State," whichever one that is. The German, as was carefully pointed out by the narrator, was skating to Russian music.