ADAM'S RIB
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
ADAM'S RIB is a Russian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtolovich. It stars Inna Churikova, Svetlana Ryabova, Masha Golubkina, and Elena Bogdanova. With English subtitles. Unrated.
ADAM'S RIB follows a few days in the lives of four women in a small Moscow apartment: the paralyzed grandmother, the mother who works part-time as a docent in a museum of the Revolution and who worries full-time, and two daughters, sired by two very different husbands. The men are peripheral to their lives, even as much as they affect them in various ways. Everybody comes together at babushka's birthday party, where various crises appear to come to the surface, some not for the first time. When the movie ends, nothing is resolved except that the three youngest agree that they cannot rely on anyone or anything (the unspoken exception being each other). The film ends with a kind of miracle the meaning of which no one is sure.
Characterizations are the entire raison d'etre for this film. The four principals are sharply drawn, three-dimensional characters with whom we feel both comfortable and familiar. I was especially impressed by Inna Churikova, the grandmother, who invests her paralysis with great emotion and strength. The scene between her and Svetlana Ryabova, her daughter, in which Ryabova first reads her mother the riot act and then begs forgiveness, is one of great power, a tour-de-force for both women.
The men include an office womanizer, an ineffectual, weak law student who aspires to become a thug, the two ex-husbands -- one a Jew, one an anti-Semite -- and a new beau for the mother, sweet, shy, with unexpected strengths and compassion. Yet none of them is there when babushka's bed pan needs changing. The women bicker amongst themselves in their crowded flat, but they are ones who are there to do the dirty work for each other, to figure how to make their menage survive.
This is a small film, but sharply focused, incisively written and performed. With no budget, no resources, no filmstock in all likelihood, the film maker and his crew and cast concentrate on giving us a small gem of insight, wisdom, and passion.
If you have a chance to see this Russian ADAM'S RIB, do yourself a great favor and do so, regardless of the cost.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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