The Long Farewell [1971]

 Iconoclastic feminist filmmaker Kira Muratova’s second solo directorial endeavour, The Long Farewell, was a daring, dazzling, hypnotic and radically experimental work that was informed as much by the Soviet montage theory of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov as Godard’s love for playfully shattering the conventional inter-relationships between audio and visual grammars. Thus, while her previous film Brief Encounters – the two often considered as companion pieces – earned the displeasure of the censors, this was treated by them as a downright expression of mutiny; consequently, not only was it shelved and released only with the advent of ‘Perestroika’ in 1987, Muratova’s directorial career too was impacted for years, forcing her to shift from Odessa to Leningrad and work outside the industry until her rehabilitation; the parallels with between her and avant-garde Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová are unavoidable. Yevgenia (played by renowned theatre actress Zinaida Sharko) is a well-off, vivacious middle-aged woman admired by her colleagues and friends. She’s also a domineering single-mom who dotes on her teenage son Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) to the point of extreme emotional dependence and exasperation. Hence, when he decides to move in with his dad in Novosibirsk upon experiencing a growing sense of estrangement with his mother, she begins to unravel. Her discontentment and Sasha’s disconnectedness were portrayed through splendid impressionistic bursts, interspersed with moments of quiet candour, and made particularly haunting by Muratova’s use of off-kilter formal choices – elliptical editing, repetitions, syncopated dialogues – along with stunning camerawork, moody B/W photography and a jangling, brilliant piano-based score. Yevgenia’s escalating inability to communicate with her son, ironically, stood at odds with her vocation as a successful translator, while the film’s freeform style underlined the duo’s unnerving push-pull relationship.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Family Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)