The Boston Baltic Film Festival runs in-person from 3/1 through 3/3 at the Emerson Paramount Center and will continue virtually through 3/18. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage!
A digital record of the director’s own family over four years, documentarian Staņislavs Tokalovs’ Everything Will Be Alright has the sort of intimate access that negates the challenge to realism that the presence of a camera often presents. Anyone will act a little different in the presence of a camera, but his closeness to the subjects — three generations of his own ethnically Russian immediate family in Latvia — more than compensates for the strangeness of the camera. Everything Will Be Alright is a touching and sincere account of a complicated domesticity at a hyper-specific cultural moment, namely the pandemic years and the beginning of the war in Ukraine, that questions without resolving what it means to belong to a place.
“I will put a mask on you just in case,” Irina tells her mother at a V-Day event during the pandemic. “Okay, but why?” the clueless grandmother asks in confusion. “It’s a confusing time,” her daughter responds. The matriarch of the family is Ina. At just 16 years old, she joined the Soviet military and fought on the frontlines of WWII, earning her fair share of medals, including one that the Russian military sent her in commemoration during the documentary (“Putin sent you this”). Now she’s in her nineties and struggles with a form of dementia. She mostly floats passively through her days with the assistance of her daughter, Irina. On more than one occasion, there is some confusion between the two about whether or not the aging grandmother has swallowed her teeth. Safe to say, she’s not fully present; yet, the rituals around her anchor the family. Irina connects them most strongly to their Russian past, a history that becomes more and more of the past as the years and generations move forward.
Patricija, Irina’s daughter and Staņislavs’s younger sister, like most second or third generation immigrants, experiences a greater connection to her present cultural location than to her historical one. She’s also at least half responsible for the film’s most touching scene. Her dad, Raul, gives her a gift in a small box on Christmas, presumably jewelry. (We never get a close-up of the gift itself, but we do know that it’s blue, not typically a color that Patricija wears.) She opens the gift with a cutesy innocence and honesty just like anyone who has ever opened a gift in front of another. Her reaction is not entitled or thankless; she’s also not over the moon in an ecstasy of gratitude. Her dad, Raul, is crushed by the honest reaction. The scene tumbles through emotions like a washing machine not because he is upset with her but because he was so anticipating fulfilling his daughter’s hopes that he lets himself down as a father. There is no warming hug to rectify the situation — or, at least not one the camera is privy to — and that lends even greater authenticity to the vulnerability of both Raul and Patricija.
Entering, I was skeptical of the film’s capacity for authenticity because of the director’s insular focus on his own family. Sounds boring and potentially self-aggrandizing (or, perhaps, a bit too “ooh, pity me and my poor family), right? Wrong. Staņislavs’ personal access enables the film’s finest moments to surface through the most painful of family sores and domestic squabbles. Raul, coming off as sweet in the interaction with his daughter, could never be mistaken for sweet in his marital life. He swears off New Year’s celebrations, which, in many former Soviet-ruled countries, have taken on tremendous importance at least in part because the communist party suppressed Christmas; for his purposes, it’s of great import to Irena and she’s clear about that. Even in non-holiday times, the parents’ mode of communication exclusively resembles combative arguing and love-sapping bickering. Their son the director never interferes and never turns away. The minimal two-man crew with cinematographer Valdis Celmiņš enables such a space. Had another director been in his stead, the capturing (and presentation, most importantly) of the same interactions from his family would have been less meaningful. That he chooses to keep them is both brave and potentially transformative. One can only wonder what their family screening of the film was like.
The home where the camera keeps to for most of the picture is cluttered with dirty dishes, and negative space is a rarity. Their basic needs are well met, it would seem, yet humble. They are forced into humility in other ways too. 30 years into Latvia, and the family sticks to their Russian. They watch Russian-language TV, joke about the Kremlin, and take immense pride in Ina’s youthful military service. The war in Ukraine stirs the family, mostly a silent stir, and it’s clear they are puzzling through how to make sense of the war as Russian immigrants in a nation once occupied by the Russians. The brunt of the reflection falls on Irena as the middle-aged of the three women; Ina’s too distanced for meaningful reflection or even conversation. Patricija is also too distanced, though, for her, the distance is generational rather than a deteriorating-related issue.
With some luck and planning, Tokalovs captures a monument being brought to its knees as the film comes to an end. Old ideas about how the world works are now defunct. Previous constructions of personal identity are at a crossroads with the changing climate for the Russian immigrants in Latvia. Even without understanding the specific symbolism of the monument — a Soviet commemoration of the defeat of fascism and simultaneously a reminder of the communist occupation — the symbolic significance can’t be mistaken. This is our home now, the crashing monument suggests. And there’s something both violent and beautiful within that vulnerability.
Tokalovs also has a mini-series, Soviet Jeans, and a feature film, Lovable, playing at the festival.
The poet at the center of Vytautas V. Landsbergis & Giedrius Tamoševičius’s film of the same name, Kostas (Donatas Zelvys), is not the typical cinematic artist. He’s no self-wallowing metropolitan libertine graced with a girth of natural talent and an ideology as clear-cut as a textbook. If anything, this overused characterization may describe the inverse of Kostas. He is a lost soul trapped in the body of a famous poet in a decisive time in Lithuanian history.
It’s 1947 and Lithuania is torn in a struggle between the occupying Soviets and the national partisans. The famed poet faces punishments for publishing anti-Soviet material and must teach in a small town as recompense. There he encounters the partisan rebels and finds himself in a pickle between the two ideological stances, flipping the ideological presentation of his writing to best suit his own chance of survival. His writing, in translation, reads so simply in both theme and form that it could be disguised as something one would encounter in a fifth-grade literature class. Kostas himself admits this, acknowledging, perhaps honestly or perhaps not, that he writes his poems for himself and then, in a game of Mad Lib, fills in words like “Stalin” and “Soviet” to pass by the authorities.
The Poet looks dry and desaturated. Life in 1947 countryside Lithuania is as lifeless as my dad’s spice rack. It’s ugly and that’s the point. It’s also ugly in another way. The cinematography has a defiantly and unflattering digital quality to it reminiscent of the average streaming original TV show. One theory behind that ugly desaturated look so common now is that the ubiquity of the digital camera — a technology whose innovative uses have, as a whole, improved the state of cinema — has created an easier pathway to less intentional cinematographic decisions. It’s easier to tweak the default look of the “raw” image than it is to create that look when shooting on film. I could be wrong but that doesn’t change the fact that The Poet fails to inspire as something primarily visual. The camera is too detached to fully draw into Kostas’s inner mind and too focused on its period-piece quality to try for something more poetic.
Musing on the poet’s role in society, the great filmmaker Werner Herzog believes that “It’s only the poets [that] hold a country together.” By these romantic standards, it would be wrong to think of Kostas as a poet; he’s more of a scribbler of words. He doesn’t hold a country together as much as he resembles the disunity of life under occupation. Kostas embodies the more honest description of the poet: the somewhat elusive community artistic representative or a window into culture. How he flips sides is too embarrassing for Herzog, yet also too authentic to be disregarded as inappreciable. There is not always a there, there. Sometimes the artist creates simply to make ends meet; the art they produce has a consumerist or utilitarian teleology. And that’s what Kostas’s words seem to be all about.
Of course, it’s fine (and even good) for art to sometimes have an end beyond its artistic value; the artistic value doesn’t begin to depreciate until the place of art becomes reduced to its other ends. The American studio system is a case in point. Once, filmmakers and artists were involved in the larger picture of green lighting projects and creative planning. Now that everything is decided by accountants and algorithms our studio films have suffered unnecessarily. Landsbergis and Tamoševičius’s film isn’t quite that lifeless — there is something quite human about it all, after all — but the poetics were left by the wayside in an attempt to be (too) human.
The Poet
2022
dir. Vytautas V. Landsbergis & Giedrius Tamoševičius
112 min.
Everything Will Be Alright
2023
dir. Staņislavs Tokalovs
95 min.
The Poet screened on Sunday, March 3, 4:10 pm and will be followed by a Q&A with the director. Everything Will Be Alright shows digitally from March 4th through the 18th.
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online, and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.
