Little Vera has caused international tremors like no Soviet film in recent memory. Is it the explosive political content? The glasnost-inspired openness? Or could it have something to do with the fact that the leading lady sheds her clothes to a degree unprecedented in a Soviet-made movie?
It is all of these things, but the nude scenes have helped Little Vera attain an unusually high profile, both here and in the Soviet Union, where it has been a huge commercial success. Soviet films of recent decades have been so dull and academic that the candid Little Vera looks stunning by comparison.
But it would be silly to suggest that the sex scenes, tame by our standards, are the only unusual element here. As the star of the film, Natalya Negoda, recently said, “Soviet audiences were shocked not just because of the nude scenes but because they were given a possibility to observe their own lives.” There is a level of kitchen-sink realism here, an acknowledgment of problems and bitterness that is almost unheard-of in the Soviet cinema.
Negoda plays Vera, a bored, vulgar, lively young woman who lives with her parents in a crushingly industrialized seaport town. The film follows her through her prickly relations with her parents (the father is alcoholic, the mother worn down) and her affair with a young man (Andrei Sokolov).
The movie, especially in its first hour, vividly captures the dead-end nature of this existence. Vera, given stunning life by Negoda (whose appearance in the May issue of Playboy has given new meaning to glasnost), is a livewire trying to set off sparks under unhappy conditions.
The filmmakers are a husband-and-wife team: Vasily Pichul (director) and Maria Khmelik (writer). They bring a great deal of grungy veracity to the situations in the film, although the grittiness becomes a bit overwhelming by the end.
Would the film be receiving as much attention if it had been made in another country? Probably not. But there does seem to be new, important ground being broken here. When Vera and her boyfriend lie together on the beach, he asks her what her goals are. She flashes him a look and says, “We have a common goal: Communism.” It’s meant as a joke. That’s new ground.
Not that all Russian films were dull, but we’re talking in general here. The movie does seem to have been more of a novelty than a work of cinematic art, but it was necessary at a moment when a giant culture was teetering on the brink. At the time Negoda made many balalaikas ring out, but she has done fewer than a dozen pictures in her career.
Among the myriad inanities of our touchy-feely, psychobabble culture, there are many juicy targets for satirization, perhaps none more deserving than radio pop psychologists. In Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me, there was some subtle play around the radio shrink, Dr. Nancy Love, although that movie had other flavorful fish to fry.
More conventional satire is found in The Couch Trip, the plot of which somehow shoehorns a mental patient and “pathological misfit” (Dan Aykroyd) into the role of Beverly Hills psychiatrist. As with most movie mental patients, Aykroyd is merely a brilliant free spirit, saner than his doctors, etc.
When he impersonates a doctor and breezes into Los Angeles to replace a popular radio shrink, it gives Aykroyd the opportunity to tear into some amusing riffs. His on-the-air free-associating constitutes the film’s funniest moments, as this impromptu healer gives his callers straight talk and profanities instead of the standard audio hand-holding.
It’s healthy satire, but the film doesn’t stay in this vein. Instead, The Couch Trip becomes too interested in following Aykroyd’s attempts to squeeze big money out of the real doctor’s sleazy partners (Richard Romanus and Arye Gross), and trying to squeeze anything that belongs to the doctor’s curvy assistant (Donna Dixon, who’s married to Aykroyd in real life). And the real doctor himself (Charles Grodin) is having a nervous breakdown in London, though he begins to realize that there is something strange about his replacement.
On the story level, The Couch Trip never quite gets in sync. The best parts of the film are the peripheral bits, such as the radio show and the occasional intrusive commercial announcement (Chevy Chase cameos in a condom ad, and there’s a straight-faced plea for the members of a hang-gliding memorial society).
When Walter Matthau first appears, as one of those loonies who hang around airports pushing a cause, it looks as though the movie may strike sparks with his belligerent character (he’s demonstrating about Violence Against Plants and shouting, “Who speaks for horticulture?”). But he softens up quickly and melts into the scene—the joke, a rather tired one, is that in Hollywood the crazies fit right in.
The Couch Trip suffers from the too-many-screenwriters syndrome. Aside from the original novel basis, there are three writers listed, with countless typewriters uncredited. Michael Ritchie, the director, used to be known as a keen satirist back in the days of Smile. The Couch Trip finds him more engaged with his material than he’s been in a while, but there’s too much emphasis on the labored plot and the one-liners, and Aykroyd isn’t strong enough to carry the movie alone.
The movie betrays its desperation when it sinks to reaching for gags about mass hysteria and mass transit. Freud himself found puns an intriguing part of psychoanalysis, but this is going too far.
The day it opened, the film already seemed to have missed its moment—Matthau and Grodin, at least, should’ve been on to better things by this point. Does it have any boosters?
How well I remember the feeling from the first house that we bought (sight unseen by me, as it happens, with Ex-Wife and my mother making the decision together – and doing a fine job of it), when the builders have started to knock the living shit out of the structure that you have just paid a fortune for, and you’re left with the sort of environment that one would more readily associate either with heavy shelling or installation art – the former being only just marginally worse than the latter…
And so it proved again, when I went over to look at my new house on Sunday: much of it has gone (fortunately, the bits that the architect and I had decided SHOULD go) and there was rubble everywhere. The drawing room was home to four lavatories, the dining room was piled high with smashed tiles, and the kitchen appeared to be nothing but concrete slabs. Everywhere, windows had been leaned against walls, in readiness to be re-inserted into the new, extended structure (maybe it’s true what David Hare says in “The Breath of Life” that my generation’s legacy shall be “We came, we saw, we knocked through”…) and I was left with the panicky feeling of “This will never be done” – but then I get that feeling when painting a cupboard, so maybe I don’t need to worry too much.
In fact, if Gigantic Builder (seven feet tall, hands like coal shovels, tattoos on his arms that could contain the entire text of “King Lear”) is to be believed, it will all be done in mid November – which feels incredibly unlikely at the moment, but if they’re as quick as putting stuff in as they are at ripping shit out, then it’s probably feasible. It’s been like having two jobs, doing all this – and I have had a hell of a lot of help from a hell of a lot of people – and I can’t wait until my bit of it is done. The only thing I haven’t done is chosen tiles for the kitchen walls: this was always Ex-Wife’s area, and so I’m slightly nervous of bollocksing it up. UAG put in a bid for duck egg blue, but that’s so ridiculous, that she might get a punch in the tits. My sister has good ideas, but a VERY unrealistic idea of “budget”: so my conversations with her often involve the sourcing of high-end glass and marble compounds from individual suppliers, and then my concern over whether or not they could (instead) be found at Fired Earth.
Ah well, it is a “luxury problem” to have – and if I do fuck it up and end up with a wall full of turquoise tiles that I thought would be very pale grey, I suppose I can always rip them off and start again…
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