Christ is Risen!! Happy Bright Week! My kids are off school this week for spring break, so we are all trying to catch up after the craziness of Holy Week last week. Because Annunciation (Old Calendar) fell on the Friday before Lazarus Saturday, we ended up with 12 straight days of services in the morning and evening, including the all-night Pascha service. The kids did quite well, considering. I was able to make a lot of the Holy Week services this year (many more than in previous years) and even got to direct the choir at a few of them! (All three services were last minute, unprepped, and with a new-to-me choir, but it worked out in the end).
It being the Paschal season, I'm getting back to some shows and movies I'd put to the side for Lent. One is a movie that hit amazon shortly before Holy Week called
Despite the Falling Snow. I was really looking forward to it, as it featured 1950s-Soviet Union, spies, a mystery, and some British actors that I enjoy (Rebecca Ferguson of
The White Queen and Sam Reid, a British character actor I happen to like). It is based on a book of the same name (that I ordered before watching the show, but haven't received yet). Both the book and the screenplay were written by the same author, Shamin Sharif, and the film was also directed by him.
The basic storyline is about a Soviet woman, Katya, who is working as an American spy in the mid-1950s. She is run by another agent called Misha, who introduces her to a friend of his called Sasha (Alexander). Sasha is in a government ministry that would provide good intel to the Americans, so Misha tasks Katya with getting to know him and stealing information from him. She eventually falls for Sasha, and he for her, and they marry. She decides on her wedding day to stop spying, and life goes on for a while. Then things fall apart, Katya disappears, and the rest of the story is devoted to figuring out what happened. I won't say much more so I won't spoil the plot twists.
I was prepared to like this film a lot, given the subject matter and the actors involved, but I was somewhat disappointed in the end. First is that the screenplay is a little clunky. The story toggles between the 1950s and the 1990s, between the main characters of Katya (Rebecca Ferguson) and Alexander (Sam Reid) and an elderly Alexander (played by Charles Dance) and his niece Lauren (also played by Rebecca Ferguson, who struggled to get the American accent right). The non-linear story telling that is now so common in films and shows doesn't really work well here. The 1990s storyline seemed to have almost nothing to do with the 1950s storyline, and was really quite a distraction. Artist Lauren is obsessed with finding out what happened to Katya, but we are never told why. We are also given almost no information on Alexander (Sasha)'s life after Katya.
There were several subplots in the 1990s sections that really did nothing to advance the story or to flesh out the characters in any meaningful way. The time spent on the early 1990s storyline could have been spent fleshing out Katya's character more, as well as her and Misha's back story. I had a lot of questions about Katya and Sasha's relationship as well as some other minor characters that just weren't answered. The big reveal at the end could have been accomplished without all the toggling back and forth.
Second is that the costumes in the 1990s sections were terrible. I am old enough to remember 1992, and I don't remember anyone dressing like that then. It's like the costume designer just didn't research the history, put the actors in modern (i.e. 2017) clothing and hair and said, "close enough." I get that costume designers have to keep modern visual norms in mind, and that the designers are working with a visually uniform color palette, but there are ways to work around that and be true to the fashion of the time, as
The Americans have amply demonstrated. It was distracting. The 1950s section was quite a bit better on the costumes, but I questioned whether the Soviets would have been dressed quite so well in the mid-1950s, after all the devastation of the war. (Added to the fact that Soviets were famous for being less than fashion-forward by Western standards of the day). Rebecca Ferguson's clothing is beautiful and the silhouettes are correct, but her wardrobe seems too pretty and nice for the time and circumstance.
Third is that the writer made a lot of mistakes about Russian/Soviet culture, life, and etiquette. He doesn't seem to realize that the name Katya is actually a nickname and is short for Ekaterina (or Katharine in English). No one would call her by her diminutive name if they didn't know her well, and she certainly would not have introduced herself to a new person (Alexander) as "Katya"; she would have said, I am Ekaterina + patronymic, in the same way that Alexander introduces himself to her. Russians also would not have referred to her in conversation as "Katya" in the way that they do throughout the film; they would have said Ekaterina + patronymic (her father's name is never given in the film or credits, so I can't say what it would be). Russian is much more formal than American English, and there are specific ways to address one another and much is dependent on how well you know the person and the relative ages of the people involved. I also questioned whether Sasha (Alexander) would have been able to easily travel back to Russia in 1992, given his history. (And the hotel where Sasha and Lauren stay is awfully nice by Soviet standards of the day; I've stayed in hotels from that time and they aren't that nice. They aren't terrible, but they aren't that nice either).
So, the good. The triangle between Katya, Misha, and Sasha was quite interesting to watch develop, and most of the 1950s sections of the film were interesting and engaging. If you can set aside some of the cultural details I mentioned above, the sets were nicely done, and I enjoyed seeing the Moscow skyline again, as well as Red Square and the Kremlin (even if they were added later, as the film was made in Belgrade). The physical places in the 1950s parts of the film felt real to me--the Soviet-ness of it came through. I do wish that the story had developed some themes beyond the basic mystery of what happened to Katya. I do wonder if this is one of those films that was poorly adapted from a good book; I'm eager to read the book and find out if it is better (at least one reviewer said it was).
Another series set in the same era (but hugely different subject matter) is
The Red Queen; it is in Russian with subtitles on amazon, and very very good. I've not finished the series yet, but I intend to get back to it soon.
I'm also reading Anya Von Bremzen's
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, which is part memoir and part social history and it is excellent. I have a passage or two to share for Talking Tuesdays soon. The book has re-whetted my appetite for reading about Soviet times. (I'll probably get back to Figes'
The Whisperers soon). Von Bremzen's book is also strangely familiar, as there are quite a few foods and ways of eating that she describes that I remember well from my first sojourn in Russia in 1998. The
sosiski (similar to hot dogs) with canned, cold green peas and buckwheat kasha (for breakfast!), the farina with the tiny pat of butter, the
kotleti (minced beef, breaded and fried), cabbage or apple
pirozhki (yeasted bread hand pies), and
pelmeni (meat dumplings in broth). Tomatoes and cucumbers with
smetana (a kind of sour cream) and dill. Mayo on everything. The mystery-meat-of-the-week soup in the
stolovayas (public cafeterias) and the glasses of scalding hot tea that burned your fingers and you never drank to the bottom since the bottom third of the glass was loose leaves and sugar. The strangely inefficient grocery stores and kiosks that never had change for a purchase. I loved it all.
