The Long Farewell (1971) is one of the standard introductory films to the oeuvre of Kira Muratova. It’s not an anodyne fact, since the package is contradictory—a melancholy and funny film like Brief Encounters (1967), starring pop icon Vladimir Vysotsky in the lead role, lies in the company of an angry and tonic one, The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) – and her oeuvre has yet to be fully mapped out to this very day. By placing the filmography of Muratova in the hands of a group of cinema specialists and enthusiasts turns her into an object both secret and ubiquitous, which implies rarely playing safe, and stuttering often in front of the perplexity that these films so often display. In this sense, The Long Farewell is exemplary in its sudden speed shifts, which bring about a loss of references, while lyrical vignettes and amorous, à la russe soap operas frequently throw us into the fray without any warming.

Closer to Brodsky than to Freud, the film is constantly haunted by a temptation towards psychoanalysis—since, after all, what other promise can this relationship between an expansive mother and a timid son entail? —, which is opposed by a resistant reality that doesn’t allow for easy decryption. In typical Muratova fashion, the narration’s cornerstone is jackhammered between two coherent dialogues, in order to induce various paths, either towards reverie or to sarcasm. Doubtlessly, the entire affair hinges on pure editing: when the filmmaker sprinkles an inexplicable image of seagulls circling over the sea throughout a sequence that respects “the mold of the real”—even though no body of water seems to be nearby —, the film achieves a sort of extra heartbeat, which breaks one free from the deadlock of the present moment. And that is because Muratova’s cinema is, at least at a base level, a close work in the art of conflict: people spew their decibels left and right, while the camera cuts quickly in its pursuit of lines that intersect in disharmony.

On the other hand, the film isn’t that far removed from a maniacal vision—just as the film-within-a-film that opened The Asthenic Syndrome was, quite possibly the most lucid revelation, with all its madness, that acted as a testament to the dreadfulness of the nineties—in the absence of these causeless interludes, which are called to bring density to a trama that is much too accessible. I am especially thinking about its final sequence—an epiphany of the script—when Evghenia Vasilievna is interrupted from performing her duties as a doting mother by an old man who asks her to transcribe a letter for him because he has seemingly forgotten his glasses. It’s a moment in which the plot seems to simply forget about everything, and Evghenia, with an incredible amount of self-restraint, patiently helps the stranger, as we learn about his faraway family, only for him to leave and never to be seen again. It’s one of the main lessons of this cinema: that human truth, which surpasses form and ideology, often finds refuge in these nooks and crannies within the tapestry of time, removing us from the always-equal present tense of the film and thus proposing a contradictory duration, in which nothing runs like clockwork.

A contribution to the quality of these almost-tangible fictional textures—in which the story becomes possible only after it has been documented and extracted from the folds of the real—lies, of course, in the two characters who are seeking each other throughout the entire film, without the possibility of finding a common channel of understanding. The Long Farewell is one of those films whose stage is used as a set for the drama of two people trying to communicate in the same room—and one remarkable scene has the mother and son sharing the frame, but acting as if the other were invisible to them, because he is there to ask her for pocket money, and she is getting ready to go to the theater with a man. On the other hand, the film is careful enough as to not demonize anyone—on the contrary, the misfortune of this relation, which is at least apparently put into motion by the son’s vacation in Novosibirsk, where his divorced father lives—are much rather the fruit of some timing issues. It’s as if everyone would set their affective outbursts to flare precisely when the other is unavailable. Oleg Vladimirsky performs the role of a teenage boy whose mustache is just starting to grow, who has something of the dull sadness, combined with a fast-forwarded process of maturing, that only communist-era Eastern European films seemed capable of immortalizing on camera. A rebel in the deformed eyes of his mother, the boy has something of the tenderness of an object that is still developing, and the tragedy of the story lies not in its visible ravages— The Long Farewell is truly a simple apartment drama —, but in the consequences that one can sense beyond the frame. The mother, too, has her battle to wage, since she strives for total control of her “baby”—it’s also a way of taking revenge on the father —, but also for a constant presence on “the market”, as a still-beautiful woman. Akin to a Stella Dallas whose youth is slowly replaced by an increasingly earth-bound form, and of a sourness that is increasingly harder to dispel, Zinaida Sharko masterfully incarnates the sorrow of an emancipated character who feels that they’re losing control. For Evghenia Vasilievna, the most terrible of dramas wouldn’t be the loss of her guardianship over the child, as it would be her fall from the superior ranks of fiction to the level of a character who the story can easily forego.

The Long Farewell was discovered by the West a long time after the shooting was wrapped, that is, in 1987, at the Locarno film festival. It marked the moment in which festivals took onto themselves the mission of recovering unclassifiable artistic practices such as Kira Muratova’s, who lived until 2018 and who, through her films, laid various testimonies to moments of the past, from the aplomb of Soviet socialism (Getting to Know the Big Wide World, 1980), as well as about the dark abyss of the post-communist years (Three Stories, 1997). This film, which is available on Henri, the streaming platform of the Cinematheque Française, and on the Soviet Movies Online platform, is the perfect entry point into this proteic filmography, which begs to be urgently discovered, and rediscovered in these dark days for Ukraine.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.