Published via Ecency

(source: tmdb.org

One of the more overlooked aspects of early Soviet history is the Bolshevik regime’s attempts to create a new society through a near-complete break with tradition, which was replaced by various experiments and the introduction of new sexual mores that look incredibly enlightened and progressive from today’s Western perspective. Those trends, most evident in the 1920s, found their way into Soviet cinema, and the best-known example is Third Meshanskaya, 1927 silent film directed by Abram Room, best known in the English-speaking world under the title Bed and Sofa.

The plot takes place in Moscow. Volodya (played by Vladimir Fogel) is a young printer who came to the city to work in a print shop, but finds that work does not guarantee accommodation. Thankfully, he is met on the street by Kolya (played by Nikolai Batalov), a young construction foreman with whom he served in the Red Army during the Civil War. Kolya offers Volodya a sofa in the small, cramped apartment in Third Meshanskaya Street, where he lives with his wife Liuda (played by Lyudmila Semionova). Liuda is not happy, but when Kolya leaves on a business trip, Volodya easily seduces her. When Kolya learns about it, he is angry and leaves only to return and agree to share Liuda with his best friend. Things get complicated when Liuda becomes pregnant, and since she cannot say who the father is, both men insist on an abortion. While waiting for the procedure at a private clinic, Liuda decides to keep the baby and leave both men.

Abram Room had good fortune to make this film during a period when the New Economic Policy still allowed something of a private sector within the Soviet economy, and the regime’s handling of culture did not include the suffocating yoke of Socialist Realism. This allowed him and his screenwriter Viktor Shklovsky to deal with the realities of life in the Soviet state in a way that was not too flattering to the regime. The entire plot is built on the housing shortage in the Soviet capital, and those who happen to find accommodation are often forced to share it. But it was the depiction of new sexual mores that caught much more attention, and, ironically, made Bed and Sofa have more problems with censorship in the West than in the Soviet Union itself. These include very frank and uncomfortable addressing of the issue of abortion, which became legal in Soviet Russia a few years earlier. But more intriguing is the depiction of the relationship between the three main characters as a ménage à trois – something that was decades ahead of its time and would be first depicted in the West in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. Room and Shklovsky actually found inspiration for the plot in the relationship of the famous poet Mayakovsky, his muse Lilya Brik, and her husband Osip Brik. Bed and Sofa can also be interpreted as a feminist film, especially during the ending in which Liuda makes somewhat unexpected decision that was quite unusual for cinema at the time.

Room’s direction is solid, but, despite the outrageousness of the theme, his tone is very subdued, and Bed and Sofa would require more patience from today’s audience than many other silent classics. While Nikolai Batalov and Vladimir Fogel, two big stars of 1920s Soviet cinema, give great performances, Lyudmila Semionova is not that convincing as the object of their characters’ affections. Perhaps that can be explained with the aesthetic standards of 1920s Soviet Russia being very different from our own. In any case, Bed and Sofa gives an interesting insight into the everyday life of ordinary people nearly a century ago and for that deserves recommendation, at least for more curious segments of the audience.

RATING: 6/10 (++)