Eternal Homecoming
[Вечное возвращеиние]
Ukraine, 2012
Color, 108 minutes
Russian with English subtitles
Director: Kira Muratova
Screenplay: Kira Muratova
Camera: Vladimir Pankov
Cast: Renata Litvinova, Oleg Tabakov, Sergei
Makovetskii, Anna Demidova, Vitalii
Linetskii, Natal'ia Buz'ko, Georgii Deliev, Uta
Kil'ter, Iurii Nevgamonyi, Gennadii Skarga,
Evgeniia Barskova
Producers: Oleg Kohan
Production: Sota Cinema Group
Awards: Nika Award for Best Film of CIS and
Baltic States
Eternal Homecoming, the most recent
film directed by Kira Muratova, holds
challenges for the audience that are similar to
those of the director’s previous films. It is not
difficult to recognize Muratova’s authorial
thumbprint on the film: the appearance of her
favorite actors, (including Natal'ia Buz'ko,
Renata Litvinova, Anna Demidova and Oleg
Tabakov); the mise-en-scène of a genteel, wellfurbished apartment filled with her typical props
(paintings, mirrors, a piano, house plants); and
most importantly, her signature use of “twinned”
images, from the level of props to repetitive
scenes. The most important chains of doubles in
this film are created by the recurrence of
episodes.
The same simple story unravels several
times over, played out by several pairs of actors
of different ages, personalities, and occupations.
A man visits a woman; he is an old acquaintance
from her school years and seeks help to resolve
his deadlocked situation. Different actors may
duplicate one another as they play the same role,
or sometimes the same actors may play the
scenario out again, taking on completely
different visual styles. Veteran actor Oleg
Tabakov, for example, first appears in a standard
suit, while actress Alla Demidova wears a19th
century granny-style dress; the two then
reappear wearing strikingly different fashions:
now Tabakov is in a cap and hoodie while
Demidova sports a short black wig with a cigar.
Duplicated images, and thus blurred identities,
emerge in the names of characters as well: the
heroine cannot figure out whether her visitor is
Oleg or Iurii. As the heroine points out, the
nicknames of his wife, Liuda, and girlfriend,
Liusia, come from the same name. The
director’s typical tactics level out differences
and resist the uniqueness of the characters.
Only when the film has progressed to
the middle does the trick become apparent: the
scenes turn out to be fragments of casting
auditions by a deceased film director. In order
to continue making the film, a young producer is
showing the portfolio of scenes to a potential
investor, who pretends to understand this “noncommercial, art-house” film. Muratova has used
this film-inside-a-film structure before, in her
most well-known film, Asthenic Syndrome
(1989), to make a sharp comment on the
relationship between directors and audiences in
the Perestroika period. Here, Muratova uses it
to make fun of the film production process. The
scene is conveyed by ironical self-reflection, as
she cast her real producer Oleg Kohan and her
grandson Anton Muratov respectively to play the
simpleminded investor and the cunning
producer, who successfully grabs the investor’s
money by deception.
This device—of a film-inside-a-film—
shifts the focus away from the fictional hero and
heroine to the actors participating in the casting
audition. The insistent repetitions allow
spectators to discover forgotten lines and crude
acting, along with changes to the set and two
specific, recurrent props. The heroines bring
these props into the scene again and again: the
painting “A Ghost in an Armchair” and a tangled
knot of rope. The two objects repeat themselves
visually, structurally, and metaphysically as
metaphors in several layers of frames. An
armchair (covered with white fabric in the
painting) resonates with similar chairs shown in
the production screening room where the
producer and investor are located; they create a
mise-en-abyme between the two camera angles,
directed towards the screening room and the
casting-test films. The rope’s knot, which the
heroine struggles to untangle, is not only
duplicated in one of the on-set paintings, but
also implies off-screen backstories: the hero’s
tangled love life; a man’s suicide; and the
narrative, tangled into itself.
To resolve the situation, a choice must
be made. The hero is constantly put on the spot
to choose between two options: whether to drink
coffee or tea; whether he came by plane or by
train; whether he is Oleg or Iurii; and, finally,
whether to choose his wife or his girlfriend. But
he denies or ignores any given question.
Moreover, as the heroine herself notes, his
selection would be meaningless; it does not
matter who he is and whether he chooses Liuda
or Liusia. Regardless, he is coming back, twice,
thrice, even from a suicidal death reported on
television. He continues his eternal return.
Resisting or evading choices lies in the
film’s fundamental structure: a chain of
repetitive, apparently un-edited fragments that
render all the situations meaningless. The
replays exhaust the melodramatic mood
otherwise set up by symbolic domestic
decorations and nostalgic, sentimental music
(this includes Petr Leshchenko’s songs of the
1930s and Zemfira’s performance of the Duke of
Mantua’s aria, “La donna e mobile”). An
irresolute man (with his bathetic story of a love
triangle, one man’s suicide and another’s return)
becomes a light-hearted skit about human
failings and dilemmas that repeat forever.
Twice in the film, the endlessly
repeating parade of casting-test scenes is broken
by a black-and-white screen that offers two
contrasting critical moments when the camera
follows the two main actresses, first Buz'ko and
then Litvinova. In the middle of the film, the
camera tracks back, following Buz'ko from a
low-angle; the actress is coming out of the set
and yelling at the phone, complaining about the
contract. By contrast, in a separate scene
towards the end, the camera closes in on
Litvinova, sentimentally reclining on the bed
while Petr Leshchenko’s song plays in the
background. While Buz'ko’s scene reveals that
the previous scene is a mere celluloid world,
Litvinova remains in the melodramatic frame,
within the status quo. As the canny producer
points out, without knowing the deceased film
director’s intentions—which fragments to
include (the prosaic reality or the melodramatic
screen world?)—the whole film becomes a kind
of “game” to be played with the viewer.
Kiun Hwang
Kira Muratova was born in Soroca (in presentday Moldova) and completed her studies at the
State Institute for Filmmaking (VGIK) in
Moscow in 1962. After directing two films
together with her husband, Aleksandr Muratov,
she began her solo directing career in 1967
with Brief Encounters, the first of her many
films to be banned and/or severely censored by
the authorities during the Soviet era. Since the
collapse of the Soviet Union, Muratova has
emerged as one of the most important
cinematic auteurs of her age. Her lateperestroika film Asthenic Syndrome marked the
peak of so-called chernukha filmmaking, and
her post-Soviet work continues to challenge both
ethical and aesthetic sensibilities. Despite her
long association with Odessa Film Studios, all of
her films to date have been in Russian.
Filmogrpahy:
2012
2009
2007
2004
2002
2001
1999
1997
1994
1992
1989
1987
1983
1978
1971
1967
Eternal Homecoming
Melody for a Street Organ
Two in One
The Tuner
Chekhovian Motifs
Minor People
Letter to America
Three Stories
Passions
The Sentimental Policeman
Asthenic Syndrome
A Change of Fortune
Among the Grey Stones
Getting to Know the Big Wide World
The Long Farewell
Brief Encounters