lchadbou-326-26592 Review of Bountiful Summer

Bountiful Summer (1951)

Prettified Color View Of Collective Farm In Post WWII Russia

[6/10 · 4 July 2015]

In "Bountiful Summer,"a later work, in color,we see some of the feeling for landscape and the lyrical quality that graced a number of Russian director Boris Barnet's earlier films. The setting is a collective farm called "Forward," and the first of the main characters, Oksana, is introduced among a group of young women arriving by train to a town of the Ukraine; she is singled out as a heroine of labor for her achievement in the industrial sector, but now she is going to work in the countryside. The first of several songs occurs (the movie is almost a musical) when the townspeople go down the street with her,accompanied by accordions. In a second musical sequence another girl, Vera Gorosko, is introduced singing atop a haystack on a wagon being driven by two oxen; a man Piotr joins her in song, until she falls into the water. As they meet and talk she mentions how she admires Oksana. Piotr, who has returned from the war, joins his old friend Nasar and Nasar's mother in their home, they have started their life anew as well.Piotr mentions that he has no family or relatives, from which a Russian viewer would have inferred that he lost them all during the war. There is a third song with Piotr and Nasar on the accordion.Oksana and other girls arrive to share a family feast with Piotr and Nasar, as the mother heaps piles of food on the table, suggesting that post WWII Russians were not struggling to survive. Nasar talks about his impending marriage in the fall. As the women go to work in the fields, Vera chides her squad to work as hard as that of Oksana, with whom they are going to compete. Meanwhile Piotr is taken to the office where he will be working, and starts an argument when an older official thinks he is meddling and changing things. The two friends argue as well, but Piotr makes his case before the whole group.We then see the older man keeping track of how much milk is coming from the cows. In a visually lovely moment after the work day the two friends row in a boat toward the women, who are singing and eating under the trees by a fire. Finally we have the scenes of the harvest, as mechanization has been brought in. The two women's groups compete for the best statistics. At the end of the film, we see other kinds of animals on display, and the crowd sings, which builds up to the obligatory conclusion, a speech praising Stalin, whose larger photo towers over the other ones around it. "Bountiful Summer" could be criticized for projecting a rosy, romanticized view of labor on a collective farm. On the other hand most American films of the time did not deal much with people actually working, so the emphasis in the Russian movies, even if propagandistic, on the working class makes an interesting contrast. It is also an intriguing entry in the still underrated oeuvre of its director.Its sense of relative optimism and exuberance stands in contrast to the darker, more brooding black and white films of his I've seen from the 1940's, with their strong feeling of struggle.