THIEF, THE (VOR) ( director: Pavel Chukhrai; cast: Sanya-6-years-old (Misha Philipchuk), Toljan (Vladimir Mashkov), Katya (Yekaterina Rednikova), the 12-year-old Sanya (Dima Shigarev), Amalya Mordvinova (doctor's wife), 1997-Russian)
Certain people just never have any luck. Katya (Yekaterina) is such a person. Katya's husband died on the front during WW11 and this attractive young lady, is left with a child, Sanya (Misha), to raise on her own. It is now 1952 and she boards a train with her 6-year-old Sanya, and a handsome soldier flirts with her, and she instinctively takes up with him, happy to have someone strong take care of her. The film is narrated by the child who is now an adult, speaking in a voiceover, telling about how that event on the train, when the soldier, Toljan (Mashkov), acted as a father to him, was the most momentous time of his life, that irrevocably changed it, eventually even stealing away the dreams and visions he once had.That the soldier turned out, not only to be an army deserter, but a thief, who steals everything he can, even his mother's heart, is the basis for him telling his sad and ponderous story. (Can a Russian film be anything but ponderous?)
The strength of this symbolical film, is in the way the director Pavel Chukhrai, is able to explicitly show the harshness of the Stalin years as it infected the daily life of its citizens.The thief himself has a tattoo of Stalin on his chest, which he uses to impress those who look at his strong body.
Katya (the symbol of mother Russia) slowly begins to see how rotten he is, despite his disarming smoothness and beguiling charm he could lay on at the drop of a hat. When in the boarding house, where they get a room, under the false pretense that they are a family, he invites all the boarders to the circus, and while they are there, he sneaks back to the house and robs them. Katya followed him home from the circus and cursed her fate when seeing what he was up to, but she fell in love with the rascal and made the choice of running away to the next town with him anyway, in the hopes he could be a good father to her son and provide for the family.
Sanya would not call him father, only uncle, and found it difficult to adjust to the close attention the mother was paying to Toljan, that once went exclusively to him. He has constant haunting visions that his real father was watching him, wanting him to be loyal only to him.
Toljan's way of introducing him into manhood, is to have the kid strike back at the boys who beat him. The threat of giving the strap to Sanya, makes the boy pee in his pants. Sanya is always peeing in his pants when he is frightened, which the shrewd Toljan acts upon, to gain the confidence of the kid who instinctively didn't like him, by reassuring him it is just fine to be afraid, telling him that he will eventually grow out of it. The kid is so hungry for real fatherly affection, that this mock affection is enough for him to let his guard down against the professional con man, who epitomizes the evil of the Stalin years.
The weakness of the film, is that it is really not drama, but soap opera, that is convincingly done through the powerful persona that Mashkov, a Russian stage actor and romantic star of cinema, is able to evoke from his strong performance, who is cruel and capable of being loved at the same time. But the story seems contrived, it just flows too neatly together without having an energy of its own. So everything must fit together: Toljan must get arrested as a deserter, Katya is left alone and must die, and Sanya must go to an orphanage; and, when Sanya recognizes Toljan, at last, as his new father, who left him only a gun when he went to prison, he keeps the gun, trying to decide if he should go against his own nature and become like Toljan.
He runs into Toljan accidently, after 7 years of not seeing him, and when Toljan doesn't even remember him, or mistakeningly thinks that he is the son he fathered with some woman named Katya, the 12-year-old boy is completely disillusioned, especially seeing that Toljan is still working his old con game and, that, Sanya in one desperate moment of his life betrayed his real father and called Toljan father, has made him to stop believing in anything anymore, no more dreams, hopes, illusions; he is all alone in the world, there is only nothing, nothing to believe in, as he uses the only present he got from his new father, a gun, on his new father, to wipe out all his memories.
The story is just too pat to be that effective, except as a curious look at what the Russians themselves thought of Stalin and how they functioned under his regime during the '50s. The symbolism was too heavy handed to be fully believed as a viable panacea for its corrupt past, suggesting that the only way for the country to be free, is for the son, who is the future of the country, to kill the corrupt father who betrayed his family (country).
REVIEWED ON 5/14/99 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
ozus@sover.net
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
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