Friday A/V Club: When Satire, Slapstick, and Surrealism Collide

Six years ago, I wrote a
story about a satire that had been suppressed in the Soviet
Union and rediscovered many decades later. Here’s how the article
opened:

At some point in our lives, we’ve all waited in a
line for so long that time seemed to stand still. In My
Grandmother, a strange and wonderful silent comedy made in
Soviet Georgia in 1929, this happens literally: As a “notorious
idler and bureaucrat” cools his heels, everything around him slows
to a crawl and finally freezes altogether.

But all is not lost. From atop a mountain, a member of “the Youth
Communist League, our junior cavalry” hurls an enormous pen down
the slope and, miraculously, into the office, where it pierces the
bureaucrat’s chest, removes him from his job, and restarts the
clock. For the rest of the movie, our now-unemployed protagonist
will search for an older apparatchik willing to be his patron and
to find him a new post. Along the way, there will be no shortage of
surreal sequences, including a statue that comes to life and a
cartoon that crawls out of the newspaper; there’s also slapstick
aplenty—the central character is modeled on the American comedian
Harold Lloyd—and sets inspired by expressionist and constructivist
art.

But what’s especially striking is that Youth Communist cavalry. At
a time when Stalin was imposing harsh new constraints on Soviet
cinema, the boy’s intervention was clearly parody, not propaganda.
If you doubt that, consider a scene later in the movie, when our
antihero, applying for another job, is unable to speak to the
bureaucrat behind the desk because the latter keeps disappearing
and being replaced by someone new. “Directors are changed,” the
narration informs us. “The job remains.”

Now that we’re in an age when it feels like every scrap of
footage can be found on the Internet somewhere, I thought I’d check
to see if anyone had posted My Grandmother online. And
sure enough, the movie is out there, though YouTube unfortunately
won’t let me embed it; to see it, you can follow this link.

In that old article, I mentioned that My Grandmother‘s
mix of slapstick, surrealism, and anti-bureaucratic satire brings
two other movies to mind: Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Death of a
Bureaucrat and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. And since the
great Bob Hoskins died this week, I thought I’d top off this post
with a scene from Brazil—one where Hoskins plays a plumber
employed by a totalitarian bureaucracy:

While I’m at it: I can’t say Hoskins’ final scene in The
Long Good Friday has anything to do with My
Grandmother, but damn he’s good in it. If you haven’t seen
that movie, rent or stream it this weekend; it’s one of the best
gangster films I’ve ever watched. If you have seen it,
take a moment to absorb this part again:

Requiescat in pace.