Censors' Day Off

By RICHARD CORLISS

Start with the happy ending. Like a song escaping from jaws long wired shut, the political voice of Soviet films is suddenly loud and clear. Did we say loud? Listen to the rock music that carpets the sound tracks. It drowns out everything but the angry shouts of the teen heroes, who sleep around and do drugs while aiming to be an amalgam of Elvis and Che. The revealing documentary Is It Easy to Be Young? portrays a generation given to graffiti and hooliganism. "I don't think about what will happen to me," says one young man, spiked hair framing a pocked face. "I don't particularly want to know ... Hey, you just gotta enjoy yourself!" Goodbye, dialectical materialism. Hello, California pleasure principle.

In Vasili Pichul's smash hit Little Vera, the kids look like Sunset Strip punks and act as if they'd just invented adolescent angst. Vera's dad is a drunken oaf, abusing the children who hate him yet cling to him and lie to protect him. He could be the petty dictator of a pre-Gorbachev regime, and his daughter the strident soul of rebellion. In her sharp, defiant voice, you can hear the sound of breaking glasnost.

The filmmakers are no less rambunctious. Gone are the days when criticism of the system was voiced in picture parables so obscure they sometimes eluded the censors -- and all but the most discerning audiences as well. Now everybody gets the point. Filmmakers are sending a May Day parade of social ills -- class resentments, alcoholism, stifling bureaucracy, domestic brutality, a nationwide streak of malaise -- past the cheers of public opinion. On the reviewing stand, Mikhail Sergeyevich smiles. After all, it's his party.

Glasnost cinema is good news for Soviet citizens, who go to the movies four times as often as Americans and ten times as often as the British. Today Soviets get to watch sexual barriers fall like dominoes in slow motion. Little Vera features a love scene -- 82 seconds of topless necking and a quick tickle under Vera's dress -- that has shot viewers' eyebrows up through their hairlines. By American cable-TV standards the episode might be tame, but in a culture as repressed erotically as it is politically, Little Vera is big news.

In another sense, all Soviet cinema has become sexy, a novel commodity on the global culture market. Little Vera opens this month in the U.S., after playing the New Directors/New Films series at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in tandem with Boris Frumin's The Errors of Youth, shot in 1978 but just completed this year. Eleven Soviet filmmakers are touring the U.S. with Glasnost Film Festival, whose 22 documentaries include robust exposes on Chernobyl, the Armenian revolt and the war in Afghanistan.

But does freer mean better? Can liberalism guarantee artistry? Alas, no. Nor are today's Soviet films likely to be superior to those of the first flush of revolution. Now that the specter of Stalinism has receded, another shadow haunts Soviet filmmakers, and it may be harder to escape. This is the legacy of Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov, the giants of Soviet silent cinema. Their works (October, Mother, Earth, Man with a Movie Camera) remain at the core of every film curriculum; movies are still made in the visual language they helped invent.

Don't expect some 21st century director to filch a scene from Little Vera the way David Lean, Brian De Palma and others have quoted the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin. For one thing, critical realism, the style of most glasnost films, eschews the bold editing effects and pristine iconography of the Soviet silents. But style is subordinate to message just now: the priority is journalism, not art. To U.S. eyes, the rebels without a cause in an alienated-teen drama like Valeri Ogorodnikov's The Burglar are a sight as nostalgic as Hula-Hoops. But in the U.S.S.R. these films play like bulletins from the front lines. So for audiences at home and abroad, the excitement of Soviet movies is not so much in their quality as in their very existence.

This is no small triumph, considering the sorry history of repression exercised by Goskino, the state censorship board. For any reason or none, Goskino could cut a scene, ban a film, put a director out of work or put him in jail. Sergei Paradjanov, a lyric poet in the Dovzhenko mold, spent nearly four years in prison. Andrei Tarkovsky, the greatest Soviet director since Eisenstein, filmed Andrei Rublev in 1966; the complete version was not shown publicly in the U.S.S.R. until 1987, just after Tarkovsky died in exile. Alexander Askoldov's The Commissar, filmed in 1967, was accused of "Zionist tendencies" and suppressed for 20 years; Askoldov has yet to make another movie. Erakli Kvirikadze made his satire of Stalinism, The Swimmer, in 1981, but a crucial scene was deleted until 1987. The director stashed the offending footage in his refrigerator and waited.

Now comes the thaw, and the index of once prohibited films has become an honor roll. Enforced neglect has turned their directors into celebrities, legendary fighters in the film resistance. Frumin, who immigrated to the U.S. after The Errors of Youth, a bleak road movie, was shelved a decade ago, returned to Leningrad last year to finish editing the film. Elem Klimov, a tenacious renegade whose own films (the historical drama Agony, the peasant- revolt parable Farewell) have been censored and suppressed, is the union's first secretary, unlocking vaults and disarming the Goskino octopus. For the first time, a filmmaker runs the country's movie industry. Not only have the insurgents stormed the winter palace, they are sitting pretty in it.

The danger is in believing Klimov and his colleagues can produce an ideal creative climate. But Soviet filmmakers know not to expect too much. In Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's poignant comedy Lonely Woman Searching for a Life Companion, a seamstress places a personal ad on walls around her town. The results are dire. The first man to answer the ad insults her, tries to rob her and then leeches on her kind nature. A trio of Young Pioneers, encouraged to take pity on the "sick and the lonely," offers to take her for walks in the countryside. She nearly loses her job. She never finds Comrade Right. But in the last shot, her neighbor is tiptoeing down a night street, slapping her own ads on the walls.

The first single woman is the Soviet moviemaker of yesterday, whose failed struggle made the new freedom possible. Her neighbor is today's film artist, whose pictures are as artless as a cry for help and as urgent as the dream of a better future. It would be nice if the U.S.S.R. could produce a few masterpieces, as it did 60 years ago. But happy endings are, after all, the stuff of movies, not moviemaking. And what Soviet filmmaker would dare hope for more than a resolute beginning?