Soviet helmer Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's fourth feature offers an intimate view of contemporary Muscovite life as exemplified by three generations of one Russian family, cramped together in a small apartment.
The film opens with a static image, the painting of a bucolic river town hanging on the wall near the grandmother's (Yelena Bogdanova) sleeping niche. Paralyzed, she must rely on her daughter, Nina (Inna Churikova), and granddaughters, Lidia (Svetlana Ryabova) and Nastya (Masha Goloubkina), for
her every need. Her only means of expression is a ship's bell above her bed, the legacy of the presumed grandfather, seen in what looks like a faded wartime photograph aboard a ship. Nina is a guide at a local museum; her two daughters, about ten years apart, are the products of two earlier
marriages. Lidia works in an office where she is having an affair with her married supervisor, while fifteen-year-old Nastya is still at trade school. Despite her youth, Nastya displays a wily sense of the demands of daily life; she fakes a limp to avoid a long queue for the bus and defines
communism as having the local butcher for a friend.
While Lidia must deal with her insecurity concerning her lover, Nina is being courted by a visitor from the provinces, a senior factory controller in town for a training course. Evgeny is clearly director Krishtofovich's idea of the average Russian: shy and laconic, he is contrasted favorably with
Nina's earlier husbands, Victor, a government official; and Sasha, who works in the theater and is of Jewish origin. Grandmother apparently had something to do with the failed marriages, since Nina accuses her of this when the bell is rung at a key point in Evgeny's courtship.
The various strands in the plot reach a culmination at a dinner party, ostensibly in celebration of Grandmother's birthday, during which Nina's ex-husbands meet Evgeny, and Nastya drops an unexpected bombshell--she's pregnant. At first everyone laughs at her joke, but quickly realizes that she's
dead serious. When Misha, her boyfriend, shows up drunk at their door, only the provincial Evgeny has both the common sense and the will to avoid a disgrace, in a scene displaying both peasant amiability and force. After the menfolk disperse, the three women begin to discuss the best way to deal
with Nastya's decision to have the child. Part way through their talk they start to hear a voice singing. With too strong a pull at the bell's rope, the grandmother has been struck by the clapper and her paralysis cured. The film ends with a freeze frame of the now erect and vocal grandmother.
Despite a somewhat thin storyline, ADAM'S RIB provides a well-observed view of modern Russian life from a welcome feminine perspective. Krishtofovich, whose 1987 debut, SINGLE WOMAN SEEKS LIFE COMPANION, was also released in the US, has been quoted as saying that the effort to understand women is
one of the worthiest occupations of a man, and except for the modest Evgeny, most of the men in ADAM'S RIB are lamentable. Lidia's lover is treacherous, while Misha is not sure whether to go to law school or become a criminal. Victor, the most successful, is a pompous name-dropper who can't wait
to retell some story about officialdom, while Sasha is simply a sentimental drunk.
The women on the other hand are fairly strong, particularly Nina and Nastya, while Lidia is cast as the far-too-idealistic romantic; it's Lidia who is critical of Nastya's wily ways, yet she herself falls victim to the simplest betrayal. ADAM'S RIB confirms the Russian variant on an old joke: If
two men and a woman were sent to a deserted island, and discovered two years later, what would be their status? In the Russian punch line, the two men are seen seated at a conference table discussing the working class--i.e. the woman laboring in the field behind them. (Adult situations,
profanity.) leave a comment
