Soviet Musical Film
Performers; Soloists/Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra
Studio: Lenfilm/Decca 074 3138 (Distr. by Universal)
Video: 4:3 color
Audio: PCM “enhanced mono”
Subtitles: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese
Extras: Chronology of Shostakovich, Excerpts from Katerina Izmailova & “Shostakovich Against Stalin” DVDs
Length: 87 minutes
Rating: ***
Have a glass of tea, sit back, comrade girlfriend, and let‘s watch this unceasingly wholesome (no kissing – just like Bollywood films) 1963 Soviet musical. American viewers of today will find it worlds different from what they would expect in a movie musical. Cheryomushki would be to a typical U.S. musical something like Oklahoma would be to Cabaret. The main reason this blast from the communist past is being resurrected is the score by Shostakovich – composed during one of his few lighter movements. (The notes reveal that even after his two denunciations and increasingly difficult times, he loved to get drunk and watch football.)
It’s really not a musical but an operetta – a form which was very popular during the Soviet era – patterned on the old-fashioned European model of Lehar, Offenbach, Strauss and their ilk. But totally without the Germanic suggestiveness. The main topic is about city dwellers having to live in crowded communal apartments due to a short supply of adequate accommodations. A new development of apartment towers was being built in a Moscow suburb called Cheryomushki and the characters in the operetta are struggling to get apartments there amidst wrangling with venal commissars and dealing with budding romances. Two of them are a couple who have been married for some time but must live separately and only meet at 6 PM each day to spend time together. The appalling living conditions are not ignored, nor are the machinations of the party officials who control who gets which apartments. One scene has them trying to kick a father and daughter out of an apartment saying that according to their records that particular apartment doesn’t even exist. And we thought they risked getting sent to Siberia for saying things like that…By the way, the actual Cheryomushki still stands outside of Moscow, sort of – an example of the shoddy Soviet construction that is falling apart faster than the really old downtown buildings it replaced.
The music is nothing special; I much prefer the galops, waltzes and other light instrumental music of Shostakovich that has been widely recorded. But those thoroughly familiar with his serious works will hear hints of many of them in the score of Cheryomushki. There is supposed to even be examples of jazz, which Shostakovich loved, but I couldn’t hear them. I did hear a reference to the pop/jazz hit Moscow Nights.
Cheryomushki the film is familiar to most Russians since it was regularly shown on Soviet TV around New Year’s until the mid-1970s (when apparently even they thought it was beginning to look dated). The colors look just like all Russian color films of the period – rather “off” – especially the skin tones. No idea exactly what the “enhanced mono” sound is; sounded like rather poor plain mono to me. Still, a historically interesting document of a past and a culture of people, in my personal view, more like Americans than many Europeans.
– John Sunier
