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Comic relief
Boris Barnet goes West at the MFA
BY A.S. HAMRAH

Some of the cinema’s finest works wait to be discovered by American moviegoers. Among them: the films of Boris Barnet, a Russian director and actor who from the 1920s through the 1960s was forced by the vicissitudes of Soviet filmmaking to move between his true homes — anarchic slapstick and romantic comedy — and the inhospitable gulags of the patriotic war film and kitsch propaganda.

Barnet’s films rival those of Eisenstein’s or any filmmaker of the Soviet cinema’s heroic age. Unlike theirs, his are funny. They are also beautiful, explosive, gliding. Whatever Barnet had to put up with under Stalin, by the late ’50s, he’d arrived at a style that transcended considerations of national borders and totalitarian commands. By then, his only rival was Jacques Tati. His 1961 Alenka, so poignant and funny and grandly entertaining, is a film by an artist who loved people and loved the movies. Once you’ve seen it, it’s painful to learn that Barnet died by his own hand, in 1965, at age 62. That’s tragic, absurd, like finding out that Harpo Marx or Gene Kelly had committed suicide.

The Museum of Fine Arts will be screening six of Barnet’s films over 10 days. The first is 1924’s The Extraordinary Adventure of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (silent with English intertitles; August 20 at 6 p.m. and August 29 at 3:45 p.m.), a crazy, politicized comedy in which Barnet plays a American called Cowboy Jeddy. Signed by Lev Kuleshov, the director who discovered Barnet in a Moscow boxing ring, the film bears the mark not only of Barnet’s future directing style but also that of Vsevolod Pudovkin, who acts in it as well. Mr. West (Porfiri Podobed), the Harold Lloyd–like president of the YMCA, visits Moscow on a fact-finding mission accompanied by his wrangler bodyguard, Jeddy. West wants to see for himself the Bolshevik savagery he’s read about in "New York magazines." Quickly kidnapped by a con-man gang led by Pudovkin, who looks like a lowlife Kafka, West learns that even in 1924, salvation in Russia is paid for with American dollars. Barnet’s Jeddy is Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan rolled into one; his acrobatics and shooting rampages, with the help of the Moscow police, save the day. Soon West is ready to "burn those New York magazines and hang a portrait of Lenin on the wall," a sentiment still shared on occasion by today’s readers of New York magazines.

Remarkable for its successful aping of Keystone comedy and French chase serials, Mr. West really comes alive when the actress Aleksandra Khokhlova shows up as a fake countess in Pudovkin’s gang. All angles, big eyes, big mouth, and tiny shark teeth, she adds something immeasurable to this pro-America boys’ night out, a modernist romp winking at postmodernists yet to be born.

Mr. West shows that Barnet was a comic actor with the good looks of a Randolph Scott and the athletic fearlessness of a Buster Keaton. It says something about his dedication to directing that he gave up acting to make his own films. The Girl with the Hat Box (silent with English intertitles; August 20 at 8 p.m. and August 21 at 2:15 p.m.) proves his choice was right. Made in 1927, this second feature reveals a director perfectly in control of comic timing and characterization. The House on Trubnaya Square (silent with English intertitles; August 21 at 3:45 p.m. and August 29 at 2:15 p.m.), Barnet’s 1928 follow-up, is generally given the edge for its anarchism and all-out craziness, but The Girl with the Hat Box is deeper and more rewarding. It points in the direction of the romantic Barnet who in 1936 would make By the Bluest of Seas (August 26 at 4:30 p.m. and August 28 at 12:45 p.m.) and, much later, Alenka (August 27 at 6:15 p.m. and August 28 at 2:15 p.m.).

Off-the-cuff and hectic in its comic assaults on various Russian social problems of 1928, The House on Trubnaya Square follows the steep learning curve of a girl from the country as she comes to political consciousness. Paranya (Vera Maretskaya), the bumpkinette, arrives in Moscow carrying a duck and little else. Barnet moves her through an impressive apartment-building set, where she disrupts the lives of the other residents.

In The Girl with the Hat Box, Barnet’s heroine, Natasha, is as capable as she is lovable. Maybe that’s because she’s played by the beautiful Anna Sten, an actress so vivacious that she was subsequently signed to a Hollywood contract by Samuel Goldwyn. Rarely seen in this movie without a hat, scarf, and heavy winter overcoat (Barnet is a poet of winter), Sten, with her cupid’s-bow mouth, thick, dark curls, and eyes like beacons, is covered up but sexy. Even knocked unconscious, she radiates star quality. The force of charm is on her side, so much so that Barnet can have her turn the film’s final kiss bloody. In this film, however, the violence of his comedy is tempered with an affection for his characters that distinguishes his later work and sets him apart from most other Soviet directors. He explodes his characters out of the monumental Soviet marble. They abandon poses and come to life.

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Issue Date: August 20 - 26, 2004
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