To appreciate the nuanced merits of Shy People, the
viewer would be better advised to know a bit about its Russian director and
story-writer Andrei Konchalovsky.
First, Konchalovsky is equally renowned as an
original scriptwriter as he is as a director. Few are aware that Konchalovsky
and Andrei Tarkovsky (who is now accepted worldwide as a cinematic maestro)
were classmates in film school. Fewer are aware that three of Tarkovsky’s films
(Tarkovsky’s diploma film made for his film school and two later celebrated
feature films Andrei Rublyev and Ivan’s Childhood) were
coscripted by Konchalovsky. Both these Russian directors are equally well-versed
in Christian theology, a fact that most viewers not sufficiently exposed to
that aspect will miss out on, in almost all their works. Konchalovsky, more
than Tarkovsky, is more exposed and devoted to great writers (playwrights
Chekov, Turgenev, Pushkin, Shakespeare and contemporary ones such as Tom
Kempinsky, and novelist Dostoyevsky) and scripts and writings of the Japanese
master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (The Runaway Train) as is evident from
his cinematic and dramatic output. His
interests and knowledge are staggering—music, sociology, politics, to mention a
few but often Russia-centric.
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| Drugs and sex: the young girl from Manhattan, Grace (Martha Plimpton) woos her "jailed" cousin Tommy (John Philbin) |
There are three phases in his career—his pre-US output in
film and theatre within Russia, his short-lived US career, and his current post-US
work on his return to his native land. By any evaluation, his career in USA had
its highs and its lows. Shy People is one of the three remarkable films
made in this period, the other two being The Runaway Train and Maria’s
Lovers. The weaker works of this period included the film version of
Kempinsky’s play Duet for One, Homer and Eddie and the very commercial Tango
and Cash (which Konchalovsky did not write but merely co-directed under
intense interference by studio executives). A major contributing factor for the
low popularity of Shy People was the demise of the Cannon film company,
which coincided with that film’s completion and release. Shy People,
after winning the Best Actress Award at Cannes, suffered a limited
release within USA and no Oscar nomination. This is in sharp contrast with the
success of The Runaway Train (a film that won a Golden Globe for Jon
Voight as Best Actor and three Oscar nominations, and a nomination at Cannes), Duet
for One (a Golden Globe nomination for actress Julie Andrews), and Homer
and Eddie (winner of the best film award at the San Sebastian International
Film festival). Thus even the bad films of the uneven US period actually
resulted in critical recognition, with the exception of Tango and Cash.
The post-US phase that began in 1991 has resulted in higher
international acclaim for Konchalovsky. Two
of his films in this phase (The Postman’s White Nights and Paradise)
have won the Best Director award and a third (House of Fools) a Grand
Jury Prize at the Venice film festival.
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| A prison within a house, created by a mother for a son Tommy (John Philbin), while his mentally challenged brother Paul (Pruitt Taylor Vince) is free to roam |
Thus, Shy People, which was to be his final film of
his US phase, uncannily anticipates his eventual return to Russia, because there
are several elements in the film that are very Russian for a keen observer.
What is Russian in Shy People, one might ask? If you knew the basic
information on the director and a little bit of Stalin’s Russia, the huge
portrait in the living room of the Sullivans has an unmistakable resemblance to
Joseph Stalin. Joseph and Joe (the film’s character) are other hints. The fictional character of Joe closely
resembles the famed brutality of the Russian dictator. The isolation of the
fictional Louisiana family in the bayou devoid of friends and technological
progress complete with a prison within the compound of the house would bring
back memories of Stalinist Soviet Union with its penal colonies in Serbia. A
Konchalovsky devotee who has seen his much later work The Postman’s White Nights
(2014) made in the post-Stalinist, post-Glasnost Russia that reprises the
lonely and sometimes scary boat rides of the Louisiana bayou after a 30-year
gap will wonder at how his mind was focused on life in his homeland while he filmed
in USA and how he transposes the filmed imagery in USA to modern Russia. The basic statement in both films remain the
same—some people live in a time warp removed from scientific progress rubbing
shoulders with good people and bad people, essentially carbon copies in both
countries. Both films give a lot of importance to memories, metaphorically
presented as photographs of the past—the 2014 film begins with such a sequence,
while Shy People includes it in the middle. In Shy People there
are townsfolk in smaller US towns living in awe of color TV programs, while in The
Postman’s White Nights there are isolated rural communities, the
inhabitants of which are ironically penalized for fishing in their nearby
waterbodies while influential military personnel can do that without restraint and
Russia continues to send vehicles into space in a facility not far removed from
them.
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| Barabara Hershey as Ruth (left) and Jill Clayburgh as Diana (right) are cousins meeting for the first time. The jewelry, hats, clothes and demenor are contrasting. Looking on is Ruth's mentally challenged son Paul (Vince). |
Shy People is a lovely essay on family relationships
contrasting the stronger binding forces in rural, isolated communities to the
weaker, cosmopolitan urban communities—here Louisiana’s bayou versus the
freedom of the upper crust living in Manhattan in New York. Two mothers are contrasted
from the two different represented geographies, both dealing with wayward
offspring. One mother is religious and
indirectly quotes a passage from the Bible’s book of Revelations on
being “lukewarm and not being hot or cold.” There is no mention of
religion in the spoken passage, but the director is able put it in context by
adding the end-quote at the end of the film, soon after the urban mother
decides to be “hot” (taking assertive control) about influencing her wayward but intelligent daughter on the
flight back home to New York
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| The end-quote appearing in the night sky through the aircraft window on the return flight |
“I know thy work, and thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth” Revelations 3: 15-16
The choice of names by scriptwriter Konchalovsky seems to be deliberate and alludes to Biblical characters, e.g., Ruth in the film and the Bible, while Diana is very Greek and non-Biblical. The three sons of Ruth have Biblical names. Both Tarkovsky and Konchalovsky reflect their spiritual beliefs in their films, often deliberately.
For those who are familiar with Russian films, the
importance of the bonding between mother and her offspring recurs with poetic
flourish in Aleksandr Sokurov’s masterpiece Mother and Son (1997) and
way back in the silent era with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (1926).
Sokurov explored connected subjects—grandmother and grandson in Aleksandra
(2007) and father and son in Father and Son (2003). A recent Cannes award-winning
film Closeness (2017) deals with the reverse—the bonding between a daughter
and her parents.
A casual viewer of Shy People is likely to dismiss
the film for being unrealistic—which it is, in some ways. Can a writer of Cosmopolitan
magazine throw her weight around in a small town in Louisiana and influence the
local police? Can a woman injure a man in public with a gun wound and get away
with it? Is it a ghost story or is it not?
Repeated viewings of the film will reveal the depths of the film
and magical combination of inspired acting (Barbara Hershey and Jill Clayburgh,
in particular), the cinematography of Chris Menges, the art direction/production
design of Leslie McDonald, the music of Tangerine Dream, and the director’s script. This is a
masterpiece of American cinema, crying to be discovered and acknowledged as
such and definitely a Konchalovsky gem ranking alongside his The Runaway
Train made two years earlier.
.
P.S. Shy People is one of the
author’s top 100 films. It won the best actress award for Barbara Hershey at
the Cannes Film Festival. Several films mentioned in the above review, the US
film The Runaway Train (1985) and the Russian films The Postman’s White Nights (2014) and Paradise (2016) have been reviewed
earlier on this blog. (Click on the name of the film in this post-script for a
quick access to those reviews on this blog.) Thankfully, the film has been
uploaded on Youtube by a kind soul making it available for wider viewing.
