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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 catastrophe’s 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. It’s 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 village’s 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 spring’s
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
she’ll be using to wash clothes: “It’s 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 it’s 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,” we’re told – and it’s true: the villagers plant and harvest
their own food, and have no regrets about rejecting the government’s 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 Masafumi’s cinematography
captures some stunning, Caspar David Friedrich-esque landscapes of tree,
field, mist and sun (the terrain looks similar to that in Tarkovsky’s
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 Alexei’s 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 priest’s
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 it’s 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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