‘The Belovs’ Review: Another View of Farm Life
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Belovs’ Review: Another View of Farm LifeThe director of “Gunda” filmed two Russian siblings in the early 1990s.A scene from the documentary “The Belovs.”Credit…Film ForumDec. 17, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETFor viewers charmed by the Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky’s “Gunda,” an immersion in the sights and sounds of farm life from something close to a pig’s-eye point of view, Film Forum is streaming an intriguing portrait of agrarian living that the director filmed in 1992.Likewise shot in black and white and just as hermetic in its purview, “The Belovs” retrospectively plays like a human-centered companion piece. It focuses on a sister and a brother — Anna, a double widow; Mikhail, left by his wife presumably long ago — who live together on a farm in western Russia. But it’s also a different kind of documentary. In “Gunda” and the preceding “Aquarela,” Kossakovsky turned his gaze on nature’s wonders. “The Belovs” finds him working closer to the direct-cinema tradition of the Maysles brothers (“Grey Gardens”), giving eccentric personalities the space to reveal themselves.“Why bother to film us?” Anna asks in “The Belovs.” “We are just ordinary people.” Initially, it’s tempting to agree. Kossakovsky shows Anna talking to her cows and even the wood she’s chopping. The film, periodically scored with eclectic, global song selections, delights in observing a dog run ahead of a tractor or torment a hedgehog.The human angle comes to the foreground when the siblings receive a visit from Vasily and Sergey, their brothers, and Mikhail’s ramblings about the Soviet system (which had just ended) threaten to derail a pleasant tea. Kossakovsky stations his camera in a corner, in a voyeur’s position. Later in the film, he cuts the sound during a nasty argument. As in “Gunda,” this is behavior to watch, not explain.The BelovsNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
