The most surprising aspect of Andrei Tarkovsky's graduate project from the Moscow Film Institute is that a director who would later be known for his dense, opaque meditations on more than one difficult theme could begin his career with a story of such benign, uncomplicated innocence. Using warm pastel colors and a (mostly) adolescent cast, Tarkovsky follows a small boy, a budding musician at the mercy of his less sensitive peers, to his daily violin lesson, where he silently flirts with another young music student, and later finds a new friend in the operator of a steamroller at work outside his apartment. The traditional Soviet preoccupation with heroic workers and heavy machinery does nothing to disrupt the lyrical charm of the scenario, and the spare elegance of Tarkovsky's direction (the film is only 46-minutes long) is distinctly refreshing compared to the protracted artistic angst of his later masterpieces.
Review of The Steamroller and the Violin
