Neil Young’s Film Lounge – Alexei and the Spring

Published on: March 23rd, 2004

ALEXEI AND THE SPRING

7/10

Alexei to izumi : Japan 2002 : MOTOHASHI Seiichi : 97 mins (some sources give length as 104 mins)

Everything, perhaps, flows from Chernobyl: the nuclear-plant disaster in 1986 has been cited as the single event which led most directly to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Realising that the catastrophes scale and impact were too vast to contain, the Soviet authorities had to abandon their decades-long policies of silence and stasis and begin the process of Glasnost, or open-ness. Which, in turn led to the dismantling of the Berlin wall and eventually of the Soviet Union itself – leaving, in the early days of the 21st century, the United States as a grotesquely swollen hyperpower.

Such global concerns are a world away from the peaceful, rural surroundings of Chernobyl itself, of course including the village of Budische, 180km in the Belarus province of Gomel, right next to the Russian border. Its here that Japanese documentarist Motohashi found the subject of his second feature the local spring and the villagers who use and maintain it. After Chernobyl the whole area was declared unsafe and the residents told to decamp en-masse to the nearest major town, Chechersk. 55 remained: the villages oldest residents, plus Alexei Maksimenko, a 34-year-old man with learning difficulties resulting from a childhood illness.

The film begins in winter 2001, with the terrain blanketed by snow and frost. But then Alexei our narrator – recalls the previous summer, when the springs rotten wooden surround needed replacing no easy task when the average age of the repairers is 71. We see the old villagers cut down logs from the surrounding deep forest (in scenes reminiscent of La Libertad), cut them into shape, then use a horse to drag them into place. Once Alexei has finished his combining duties in the fields, he brings his more youthful muscles to bear on the job. As the men celebrate with a toast of vodka, one of their womenfolk arrives to inspect the area shell be using to wash clothes: Its too small, she sniffs, hobbling off and refusing their offer of a drink.

The maintenance of the well forms the central drama of this absorbing anthropological study, but its far from being the only noteworthy event. Motohashi shows us the Budische residents at work and at play this is largely a self-sufficient community with only minor concessions to the 20th century: Alexei has use of a combine harvester obtained from a defunct communal farm, but most tasks are performed the old way, by hand. Money doesn’t matter much, were told and its true: the villagers plant and harvest their own food, and have no regrets about rejecting the governments offer of Chechersk apartments.

Towards the end of the film, one elderly couple goes to visit their young family in Chechersk and while the town isn’t exactly a slum, we can quite understand the Budischers reluctance to leave: Ichinose Masafumis cinematography captures some stunning, Caspar David Friedrich-esque landscapes of tree, field, mist and sun (the terrain looks similar to that in Tarkovskys childhood as recalled in Mirror) aided by a restrained, sympathetic score from Sakamoto Ryuichi (a world away from his Hollywood commissions).

Though Motohashi doesn’t hold back from conveying the harshness of winter, he elegaically evokes a way of life that is, by nature of the residents extreme age, about to disappear and many skills (such as the basketweaving practised by Alexeis father) will go with it. The unusual, dramatic circumstances of Budische means the village serves as a microcosm of global progress the long decline of such small communities is demographically telescoped here, and Alexei ruefully acknowledges that the spring walls will probably never be repaired again.

Motohashi, while sensitive to the broader sweep of history and economics, doesn’t lose track of the vivid smaller details that make Alexei and the Spring lodge in the memory, and work much more effectively than Shoes From America, the German-Ukraine feature which starts from a similar premise. As in the recent Hungarian slice-of-village-life feature Hukkle, nimbly-edited vignettes capture the close relationships between the villagers and their animals (domestic, working and those reared for food), and between each other, as they make their living in what the local priest, arriving to bless the (somehow uncontaminated) waters, calls this afflicted land that is our home. In a film full of striking images (including a terrific final panorama of the spring and its environs), the priests visit occasions perhaps the most potent of all, when we see the villagers small, hand-carved crosses floating in buckets of the spring water. And for a few seconds its hard to remember whether the crosses are sanctifying the water or vice versa.

11th May, 2003
(seen on video, 10th May)

by Neil Young

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