Cinema: A Russian Childhood

A Summer to Remember (Mosfilm; Kingsley) is a Russian film, the 16th in the current exchange program, that will surely surfer at the U.S. box office from the painful pre-release publicity devised by the A-bombinable Showman in the Kremlin. Nevertheless, U.S. moviegoers who care to look behind the headlines at some of the more agreeable aspects of life in Soviet Russia will find this picture a delightful excuse to get in and out of the fallout. Summer tells a hearty, happy, natural, touching and sometimes gorgeously funny story of a little boy’s life in Russia today. Or maybe—judging from the airy, roomy houses everybody lives in—the moviemakers really mean tomorrow?

The hero of the film is a sort of Soviet Skippy named Seryozha, a small-town tot portrayed with shining innocence by Borya Barkhatov, age 5. Plotless but not without pattern, the picture develops by episodes and apparent diversions a quite subtle study of what a father’s love and care and vigorous, manly example can mean to a growing boy.

The father is actually a stepfather (Sergei Bondarchuk), and in the film’s first episode he strides into the boy’s world like a giant out of a fairy tale. Huge-eyed with fright, the child watches the giant as he splutters prodigiously at the bathroom washbowl. Working up his courage, he inquires in a very small voice: “Are you going to whip me?” The man replies: ”Why should I?” A light wakes in the child’s eyes. When his stepfather leaves the bathroom, Seryozha goes shyly to the washbowl, makes a tentative little splutter of his own, and then dries himself on the same towel his stepfather used.

Come Sunday, friendship really gets rolling on a nifty little two-wheeler the stepfather picks up for Seryozha. That afternoon something deeper stirs when the stepfather, surveying what’s left of the bike after it runs into a billy goat, shows no sign of anger. Doglike devotion sets in when papasha declines to punish Seryozha for insulting an insulting uncle—”My dear, we must not punish a child for calling a fool a fool.” Absolute adoration is attained when the stepfather lets Seryozha spend a day at the collective farm he manages. “He’s my Daddy!” the boy thinks, popping with pride. “They wouldn’t know what to do if he didn’t tell them.”

Summer is in no sense an important work of art. It lacks the creative energy to exhaust and essentialize its subject. But it does possess, among many venial delights, one cardinal virtue. Most U.S. films about children are goose-greased with old-fashioned sentiment or mink-oiled with the latest commercial variety of false feeling. But in Summer every moment of emotion comes in strong and clear and full, every moment is natural and true. Nobody who sees this film will want to deny that the Russian people can feel profoundly and can understand profoundly what they feel. Whatever they may lack, they have a heart.