Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 10-July-11
Spoiler Rating: Medium

We Live Again (1934)

There's a special place in my heart for the great 19th-century Russian novelists who believed in the soul of both an individual and a country and the connection between the two. The idea of the soul has become cheesy and embarrassing in our century, when patriotism is a knee-jerk reaction and a moral crisis is viewed as requiring medication. Nowadays nobody could sell grand stories about the redemptive power of a land with its god and people, but such works by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still resonate. Even when adapted into an English-language film and renamed "We Live Again," Tolstoy's last book, Resurrection, sends a frisson up a receptive viewer's spine. The movie equates a man's personal shame with his cultural shame and his chance for happiness with his willingness to embrace contrition and defy the rules of his class.

We Live Again stars the ever-excellent Fredric March as a nobleman who becomes truly noble the hard way. When entering adulthood, Prince Dmitri is aflame with the revolutionary ideas that are sweeping Russia, e.g., that the gentry and peasants are essentially equal. In his fervor he falls chastely in love with the peasant Katusha (Anna Sten), who is as fresh and lovely as the farmland that bore her. She promises to wait for him, but a few years in the army strip him of his ideals and turn him into your average upper-class cad. He returns home like a wolf to a sheep pen, seduces Katusha, and leaves her with a slap in the face. Inevitably, she is tossed out into the world and ends up doing what all women in her situation do (at least in books and movies).

Several years later, Dmitri is ready to settle down with a judge's daughter, his military career concluded and his wild oats having been sown. Then he finds Katusha again. He is serving on a jury when she is brought to trial on charges of theft and murder. Though deemed innocent, she is sentenced to Siberia due to a technicality and the legal system's disinterest in a woman of her kind. (Sten transitions from sweet young thing to jaded convict well. I only wish she had been allowed to wear less make-up, since she would have made a more compelling martyr au naturel.) This injustice sends Dmitri into a spiral of revelation and self-disgust. He visits Katusha in prison and learns of his part in her downfall. His conscience won't let him rest until he takes drastic measures towards atonement. The scene in which he makes his decision is subdued but remarkably moving, the Russian-novel effect at its best. It works because of steady pacing, March's charisma, and the filmmakers' unsmirking depiction of a man's longing for rectitude; also perhaps because a movie from the 1930s can display soul-searching in a way that modern films cannot.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.