Through the 1970s and much of the 1980s, Kira Muratova’s stirring films “Brief Encounters” and “The Long Farewell” went unseen, banned by the Soviet Union. “The Long Farewell” provoked such outrage from censors that Muratova, then a new voice in cinema, was stripped of her film degree and prohibited from filmmaking for years.
A blacklist is, obviously, an undesirable home for any worthy feature. But as I watched the exquisite 4K restorations of these two films (a collaboration between StudioCanal and the Criterion Collection), I was struck by how much their stories harmonize with their embattled history. The works, which were Muratova’s first solo outings as a director, overflow with restless, disaffected women beating against the boxes in which society has confined them. The female characters pine, ache and, amplified by the dramas surrounding them, seem to scream: Life is hard! Let us free!
Both films were eventually released during the era of perestroika, and Muratova, born in what is now Moldova in 1934, went on to direct more than a dozen other features, earning international acclaim. Yet her couplet of debut films still hold a special, subversive power.
“Brief Encounters,” from 1967 and my favorite of the pair, is an audacious portrait of two women on the cultural fringes pining after the same man. Muratova plays one of the leads, Valentina — a brusque regional councilwoman in Odesa, Ukraine, who’s in charge of the water supply for local buildings. The film opens on Valentina cast in chiaroscuro, groaning over unfinished work and dirty dishes. Her malaise is interrupted by the arrival of Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), an impressionable girl from the countryside who becomes Valentina’s housekeeper.
The texture of domestic items and the soft geometries of light and shadow enhance every frame of this wry relationship drama, which regularly jumps back in time to scenes from Valentina’s and Nadia’s separate romances — and rifts — with the impish, nomadic Maxim (Vladimir Vysotsky, a heartthrob folk singer of the time). Muratova mirrors the brokenness of these entanglements in concrete objects: fractured dinner plates, faucets that won’t run, a guitar with popped strings, a tattered leather jacket. Some prove fixable. But the tragedy of “Brief Encounters” is that, despite the film’s frequent excursions into the past, life can’t just be restrung or repaired.
A more bourgeois milieu takes center stage in the “The Long Farewell,” which was produced in 1971. It charts a strained relationship between an erratic, overbearing mother, Evgeniia (Zinaida Sharko), and her angsty teenage son, Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky). As Sasha comes of age and pulls away, Evgeniia grows fragile and then melts down entirely. (Muratova was never sure why the film was an affront to censors, but she later guessed that it had to do with its avant-garde aesthetic.)
If Valentina’s job inspecting water taps in “Brief Encounters” reflects her desire to restore the flow of love between her and Maxim, Evgeniia’s career as a translator belies her ongoing failure to communicate with Sasha. In one dazzling image, Muratova conveys Evgeniia’s loneliness: She shows the mother simulating being next to Sasha by projecting photos of him on the walls of her apartment. Standing in the projector’s glow, Evgeniia gazes at the images, enduring social artifacts that — like Muratova’s films — hold small universes of comfort and pain.
Brief Encounters
Not rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.
The Long Farewell
Not rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.