Senses Of Cinema Great Directors - Kira Muratova
IMDb - 8.4/10 (46 votes)
[quote]But really, why bother to contextualize this film? Brief Encounters explains itself; it's not a mere love story, though nominally it is that. Instead, the film shows us Odessa and, more generally, Soviet life, c. 1967. The film dwells in the common failures of communism: the underfurnished apartments, the aimless workers, the crooked contractors. Utterly uninterested in being socially redeeming, the film documents society rather than show "the noble and glorious Soviet people." And what a document; there's not a single false note in this film. There are no forced dramatics, forcably dreary notes, false-ringing moments among the proletariat. What we have is real life, unadulterated.
As document, the film is superlative. As narrative, it's not half-bad either; the fractured, non-linear love triangle between director Muratova, maid Nina Ruslanova, and "Russian Bob Dylan" Vladimir Vysotsky as a geologist (who gets, happily, many an opportunity to display both his musical skills and his appealing screen persona) plays out subtly and surprisingly. At times, it feels a great deal like the work of a Russian Edward Yang or Mike Leigh; what makes Muratova's perspective unique is her ability to jar the audience's sureness about the events going on onscreen through chronological scrambling while keeping the viewer directly engaged emotionally through each scene. I didn't figure out what was going on until the end (then again, I'm thick-headed), but that didn't stop my enjoyment at all. As document, film, and character study all in one, Muratova's first significant film is a remarkable, low-key but high-dividend work.[/quote]
[quote] Muratova's film career started in 1963, with On the Steep Cliff, a student film she completed with her husband Aleksandr Muratov, whom she would divorce shortly after. In 1964 she followed with a short film, Our Honest Bread. Her first feature was Brief Encounters, which she completed in 1967, followed by Long Goodbyes in 1971. Both films were what critics called provincial melodramas, a very popular genre in Soviet cinema. Brief Encounters tells the story of a love triangle in provincial Russia, and Long Goodbyes tells the story of a young man leaving his mother to search for his father. Despite this simple and realistic content, Muratova shot these two films using experimental techniques reminiscent of French New Wave (with Jules and Jim being the main inspiration for Encounters), such as the use of jump cuts, natural locations, a lot of close-ups, a soundtrack with audio continuity different from the visual, and nervy camera work expressing the emotional state of the characters. Just like in the case of the New Wave directors, Muratova was employing those techniques as an act of rebellion against the Soviet version of le cinema du papa. Soviet authorities objected to Muratova's style, deeming it too personal and elitist. Both films form a loose diptych (the titles mean the exact opposites of each other in Russian), and both were buried by the authorities. Brief Encounters was printed in just five copies, and Long Goodbyes not shown at all until sixteen years later.[/quote]
Oversized, unverified, probably russian language with italian subs, but anyway it's the only Muratova's movie with subs of any kind available on the mule (I might be buying "Chekhovskiye motivy" from RUSCICO some days...):
[Muratova K. 1967) Brevi incontri.avi 
