Mumu and the Colt

This is animal week at the Brattle. The hero of The Colt is, of course, as awkward a spindly-legged beast as ever pranced across the screen at a Saturday matinee. This should have tipped me off as to the identity of Mumu, but my suspicions began to subside as the second film got through half its length without paying undue attention to any of the barnyard animals that lurked in the background. But, finally, Mumu turned out to be a puppy, and vindicated my hypothesis.

Of course, writers such as Turgenev and Sholokhov, whose stories the films are based on, do not write simply to entertain the kiddies. Both have their eyes on the world of men; the animals take the spotlight only because of the way they become involved with it. The common theme that unifies the two films is the ways society can stifle and destroy the natural goodness of life. Needless to say, when natural goodness first appears, it is wagging its cute little tail.

The Sholokhov piece, The Colt, is the simpler, but also the more profoundly motivated, of the two. Its hero is born in the middle of a cavalry campaign during the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution. The Red Army soldier who owns its mother, Andrei Matreyev, curses and spits and finally decides to keep it. The squadron commander, Dmitri Parkhovomenha, blusters and shouts, and finally decides to let him keep it, too. So the colt tags along through the battle and bivouac, until the soldier is killed during an attack, while trying to save it from drowning.

The acting and the photography combine to produce a sufficiently convincing portrayal of simple men at war, as when the terrified colt stumbles about the battlefield, the film gives an effective picture of life dancing innocently with death. But the attempts at artistry tend to be as heavy handed as the choir that wades in when the wind blows across the steppes.

Turgenev's target is not war, but societal injustice. But since wicked serf-owning aristocrats are now hard to find, the message has little relevance, and what remains is a sometimes amusing, sometimes touching vignette of the Russia of Alexander I. The camera follows a huge, strong, good-natured but deaf and dumb peasant, played by Anatol Kochetkov, who is taken from his plow to serve at his mistress' city house. Her whims and the cowardice of the other servants then proceed to ruin his romances, first with a peasant girl, and then with Mumu.

The two pictures point up both the virtues and the faults of Russian films. In fact, the good and bad flow from the same source, for the Russian view of life is a strongly emotional one. These films project a strong feeling of the land and the lives of its inhabitants. But this feeling is often close to sentimentality and melodrama. The soldier sways back and forth for fully a minute with a bullet in his back, while the orchestra rises and swells in the background, before he falls into the river and ends The Colt. All the characters seem to be so easily moved to pity and warmth that it was hard to believe that anyone actually could have pulled the trigger.