"What a Russian Movie..."

An interesting day of Russian stories today. I remember my mom telling me once that a Ukrainian woman scolded her (or somebody she knew) for laughing -- I believe out on the street. "Life is too serious for laughing," she said. For a country whose lore includes -- in the last century alone -- sweeping purges by Hitler and forced famines by Stalin, you empathize somewhat with the sentiment.

The first story we saw today was Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, which I always thought of as a feel-good kind of deal with lots of fast dancing. I don't know if I'd ever read the synopsis of the show before. A boy bitten by a rat king and transformed into a grotesque nutcracker. A sympathetic little girl, who transforms him with her love. Midnight comes and he's a nutcracker again. The end. It's a little like Cinderella without the last act. In the synopsis, supposedly a handsome nephew comes along and sweeps the girl off her feet at the end, but I didn't catch that part on stage. Hmm.

Then tonight we watched a movie called The Barber of Siberia, of which I won't go into great description, but at the end of which you have a promising young soldier exiled and losing sanity in Siberia, his love, abused as a child and left alone and abandoned, and a slew of other characters whose final state is something in between isolated, devastated, or at best, apathetic. "What a Russian movie," my dad said at the end.

Robert McKee, who teaches screenwriting in Hollywood, says that a successful movie leaves an audience saying, "yes, life is just like that." I wonder what it is that makes ballets/movies like this resonate with Russians/Ukrainians -- is a happy ending simply unbelievable? That would be an interesting culture study if someone is looking for something to do. Let me know what you find out!

Tomorrow is a big day -- New Year's Eve! We will go to church in the morning, then downtown to see the decorations before the craziness sets in, then to a party before coming back to the apartment to watch fireworks, seven hours before the ball drops in NYC. Talk to you soon, hopefully with more uplifting stories!