European Films

Russian documentarymaker Marina Razbezhkina makes her debut as a feature film director and screenwriter with the elegiac Vremya zhatvy (Harvest Time), an exquisitely told and -photographed tale that shows both a melancholy longing for and a strong condemnation of life on a Soviet collective farm in the 1950s. These two conflicting feelings are sure to strike a chord with many inhabitants of present-day Russia (or Eastern Europe for that matter), who feel that their communist past was both better and worse than their capitalist present.

The story is told in voice-over narration by one of the sons of Antonina (Ludmila Motornya), mother of two and the star combine driver of her Soviet kolkhoz in 1950. She has to work hard to feed her family; her husband (Vyacheslav Batrakov) has returned from WWII without his legs and can only move about the house on a simple, home-made cart. When a high district administrator makes an official visit to the farm, Antonina is awarded a velvet flag for her combine driving prowess, but the flag turns from a small token of appreciation into a downright nightmare when mice and moths start to nibble at her prized possession. What will the authorities think when they find out that she has left the symbol of their country go to waste in this manner? Why can the one object that tells Antonina that her work is appreciated not be kept whole?

The velvet banner soon becomes an obsession for Antonina, who she spends all her spare time mending the flag and her working hours trying to do her utmost to merit a new flag year in, year out. Whilst her husband gets ever more lost in his drinking binges, Antonina seems to have become oblivious to the small pleasures of peasant life; the food prepared from fresh ingredients, the beauty of the surrounding nature, the animals and her two radiant young boys. 

Razbezhkina and cinematographer Irina Uralskaya show us these pleasures through their handsomely composed photography, which aestheticises its bucolic setting without compromising the heartbreakingly realistic metaphor of Antonina’s relationship with her banner. The director's use of non-professional actors and real locations reinforce the ideas of naturalism and the style is indeed almost documentary-like in that the events seem to happen themselves, with a camera just accidentally being present, even if this camera (or rather its operator) somehow knows how to get the best out of every shot.

In an unsettling epilogue that ties the story set in the past directly to the present, Razbezhkina shows an unidentified girl go through some of the family's possessions in a big city apartment. One of the sons narrates how even he does not know who this person is, since all the members of the family (him included) are now dead. What will become of our memories, if we are no more?      

The apparently simple story of Vremya zhatvy belies its profounder depths and the complications of a people that tries to live in a present so different from its past, a past that it is both happy to have left behind but which at the same time inspires a longing for a time in which things seemed simpler, more slow-moving and beautiful despite its hardships. Is it not a strange thing what time can do to our collective memory?

This film was screened as part of the Brussels Film Festival 2005.

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