Happiness / Schastye

I wrote the following 15.May 2008

this is the movie I stumbled upon when I randomly bought a ticket in cinemateket the other day. cinemateket just recently changed their programme to one where one can hardly read anything anymore about the movies. (I used to love the layout of their programme. I even praised it out loud) now to save money or paper, or make us non-film-students feel silly and out of place/uninformed, they made it much tinyer/slimmer. I dont really know the intention. I only know that they stopped bringing us any valuable information on the movies. (of course you could check it out online, but I have been a computerless girl for weeks.)

I therefore showed up 5 minutes before the movie started, asked the girl behind the counter what this was. she answers:
"a russian silentmovie from 1932".
I say "ok. Is it any good?"
"yes. and it has live music."
"ok. fine, I'll have a ticket then."

there I was, alone, buying a ticket for a russian silentmovie from 1932 about communism that was accompanied by live piano playing written by Arvo Part. pretentious? well.. it seemed intriguing enough. and I had never watched a movie with live music before. I was excited as I entered the cinema.

Inside the cinema I laughed and laughed and laughed. this movie turned out to be a silent movie comedy about a farmer named khmyr and his wife. khmyr is the typical antihero who cannot seem to do anything right, and is constantly experiencing bad luck. a bit painful to watch at times, but with a humorous twist nonetheless funny. Slapstickhumour wrapped in socialistic everyday drama accompanied by the live piano playing turned out to be quite a hit with me, and I left the cinema feeling both enlightened, and enrichened. Such an experience it was!

I wanted to try to find the trailer or I thought I might even be able to find the whole movie online and put it in here, but no such thing. I could hardly actually find any information on it online, nearly no screenshots, and most definetely not any film to embed. what I did manage to dig up was this torrent.

and this picture:


one guy reviewing the movie on imdb states that this is a pro kolkhoz movie, I am not so sure that I agree to that. appearantly the director was affiliated with the communist party. but I interpreted most of the movie as quite anti. until the very end where I guess it turned around a bit.