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The sweet side of life

LYUBOV – Love in Russian
Regissør: Staffan Julen
(Sverige/Hviterussland)

Lyubov – Love in Russian is a lyrical journey into the Russian soul.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Belarusian author and Nobel laureate Svetlana Aleksijevich has interviewed 200 ordinary Russians about what love means to them. She has asked how they have experienced love, how fleeting it is, the loss of it, the depth it has, the despair it brings. She talks about this with a small selection of those she has interviewed, while Staffan Julen's discreet direction and camera record the work of a writer researching her book. Aleksijevich's subjects are mostly (but not all) older people whose experiences of love date from both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The sweetness of life. It begins and ends with Volodya, an artist living in a typical provincial town or remote suburb (perhaps to Minsk, Alexeyevich's hometown, although it is never explicitly mentioned), where town and country merge into a rolling pattern of prefabricated high-rise buildings. and romantic messy log cabins. Volodya is a sensitive soul who met the love of his life when he was 25 and she 20. For him, love was all-consuming, but his devotion and deep feelings were unfortunately not reciprocated by the woman he had fallen in love with. But this saves Alexeyevich until later. Instead, the viewer is drawn into the film with enigmatic images of an indefinable apartment block and Volodja's voice-over that tells of how an unseen (until the film's last picture frames) human presence constantly looks at him and waits for him… I hate to divulge too much, so suffice it to say that although the chaotic love he enjoyed and endured with a woman did not last, something arose from the relationship that required a greater love and a lifelong sacrifice that takes one's breath away. Although only three of Alexeyevich's subjects are younger than well over 50 (most are 60 or older, without the viewer being made clearly aware of it), it is not experienced Lyubov as unbalanced. Young people often take love for granted, or have not yet developed sufficient self-esteem to appreciate what love really means, even if a young, admirable couple – Zjénja, who is a carpenter, and Julia, who is a veterinarian – with two young children, give clear expression of what love means to them: "We sit down, we dream together, and it's enough to feel good," says Julia. Zjénja adds that love is like a sugar bowl where one adds small, sweet sugar crystals throughout life. They are not prosperous. None of Aleksijevich's mostly gentle souls show signs of wealth or cosmopolitan life, though one, Ira, is a retired Soviet translator who worked in Cuba in the 1960s and met Fidel Castro, and another, Zhana, a sociologist who became summoned to the KGB in Soviet times because she was a freethinking person who traveled extensively (within the socialist world) and ended up marrying a KGB officer. (His paranoia and lack of understanding of her free thinking meant the end of that marriage.)

Love is like a sugar bowl where one adds small, sweet sugar crystals throughout life.

Devotion and sacrifice. You get an impression of the film's concept in an early scene where Aleksijevich talks about it while sitting in a work room under a portrait of Fjodor Dostoevsky. But this is not a grand Russian tragedy. This is about ordinary people, from ordinary places, who talk openly about experiences that are extraordinary and ordinary at the same time. What do we mean by Olja, a hairdresser in her late 40s, perhaps, an attractive, thoughtful and strong woman who continues to live in the same apartment as the man she divorced because he lost interest in her to the degree that it bordered to contempt. It is not stated, but probably it is the economy associated with the sale of the apartment and the sharing of the sum that has forced the decision to live under the same roof, as well-known strangers. She might like to think of a new love relationship, she says, before adding in a heartbreaking glimpse of clarity: "I'm ready for a new man, a new life, but all my attention is focused on this man." When tears come, she is not alone in crying. But not everything is gloomy. The two women who loved a paranoid artist, Gena, sit in the messy apartment where he painted and drank, sharing stories about the time he hijacked a plane while holding a firm grip on a fake bomb made of wires wrapped around a pair of soap bars . "He went crazy," says Olga, one of his early girlfriends. "He hijacked a plane – 'fly me to Paris' – but when police arrived (they had landed at a military base in Rostock), he sat there crying like a child." The incident evoked in Olga a "deep, feminine love for him, like a mother of a child," but even though he pleaded with her, she would never marry him. Gena was still cared for and loved for the last 20 years of her life, by Lena. But it is not only women who (in a well-used Russian stereotype) suffer for love: Volodja's sacrifice, his open heart and his true love for another human being, although against all odds, is transcendental in its depth. Watch this movie and cry. Watch this movie and laugh. And leave the room a little wiser than when you walked in.

Nick Holdsworth
Nick Holdsworth
Holdsworth is a writer, journalist and filmmaker.

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