Word: renoir
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...Slave of Love had been made in France, it would not hold too many surprises: the movie is yet another variation on that most imitated of film classics, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. But A Slave of Love comes from the Soviet Union, not France, and that single fact casts the film in a startling light. It isn't often that the Soviets export movies that aim to be lyrical, sentimental and commercial. One could sooner imagine Universal Pictures releasing a musical remake of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky-with or without Sensurround...
Once one gets past the initial shock, A Slave of Love proves to be a decent knockoff. Like Renoir's 1939 film, it offers a moving portrait of a society on the brink of convulsive change. Set just after the 1917 Revolution, the film takes place in pastoral Crimea, where a harried group of actors and moviemakers are trying to complete a frivolous silent melodrama. Hundreds of miles away, the government has fallen to the Bolsheviks, but the film company tries to go doggedly about its business. Inevitably, Slave's characters discover that not even artists can hide...
...little Chekhov-or Gorki-as well. Too many lines are overly explicit ("We're like children forgotten in the nursery of a house on fire"); others recall the parody of Woody Allen's Love and Death ("You are choked by boredom"). Mikhalkov could also use some of Renoir's toughness of mind and poetic genius. The Rules of the Game dared to dissect contemporary France; A Slave of Love is essentially a safe nostalgia piece. Where Renoir merged theme, style and narrative into a seamless whole, Mikhalkov must shift gears as his film moves among its various...
...People can't understand that you can study filmmakers like Welles, John Ford, Renoir and Bergman the way you can study Tolstoy, Whitman and Shakespeare. Students have a difficult time accepting film as anything more than entertainment or communication. Imagine if a professor in the Music department had to spend a semester convincing students that there is a difference between popular music and music...
Professor Petric often complains bitterly in his lectures about "journalistic film criticism," which only treats film "thematically and impressionistically. Reviewers can be moved by Chaplin, excited by Renoir, or taken by Citizen Kane, but hardly anyone specifically justifies his point of view analytically or cinematically." Music or art criticism, he points out, is often analytical, whereas film criticism...