The House on Trubnaya faces a dilemma that seems a frequent occurrence in my limited exposure to Soviet Cinema; how do you balance art and entertainment, while concurrently sowing the seeds of ideology during an age of social reconstruction? Because of the difficulty of successfully maintaining multiple positions (the entertainer, the artist, the politician), the overall strength of a film is diminished through its diffusion of themes (by modern non-Soviet standards at least). All this isn't to say that the film isn't enjoyable in parts. As a comedy, the film successfully produces a few laughs especially in the first half of the movie. Paranya, the protagonist, is a very sympathetic character as the rural peasant girl in the big city of Moscow. The combination of the actress' performance, her wardrobe, and the basket she carries her duck in produce a feeling of internal warmness; perhaps (from an outsider's perspective) indicative of the monolithic essence of the hard but simple national character. She arrives in Moscow a relic of recent history in a modernizing city of bustling crowds and machines. The differences of every day life in the city and countryside create much of the humor and establish possibly the film's greatest sequence, during which Paranya chases her duck through the traffic of Moscow's streets. The chase's conclusion and subsequent narrative backtracking, is really pretty shocking for a film in an era where the vast majority of films followed an unflinching track of linear progression. (The sequence is echoed much later in Fernando Meirelle's City of God in the chicken chase through the streets of Brazil).
The aforementioned balancing act becomes problematic in the second half of the movie when we realize that Paranya isn't actually the protagonist. The worker's union is supposed to be the real hero of the story. Paranya is minimized to the face representing the collective. As a maid, she is exploited and berated by her employer, Golikov, for the majority of the film's remaining time. Her subsequent empowerment through the worker's union is supposed to be a consolation to the viewer. Golikov is told by a government official that Paranya is to be paid for her unused vacation days in addition to him serving jail time. Unfortunately this doesn't come off as much more than cheap ideological comfort in the place of emotionally engaging narrative. For the time period during which it was released, I can understand how the film was successful. The film is technically polished and has a couple of set pieces that are incredibly well done (the stair case with its strata of life and the aforementioned duck chase).In addition, the film is fairly informational regarding the rights of the common worker, allowing it to serve as a simple educational tool for the masses. However, compared to another Soviet film like Bed and Sofa, its unabashed tendentiousness blankets its potential as a truly rewarding work of entertainment or art.
The aforementioned balancing act becomes problematic in the second half of the movie when we realize that Paranya isn't actually the protagonist. The worker's union is supposed to be the real hero of the story. Paranya is minimized to the face representing the collective. As a maid, she is exploited and berated by her employer, Golikov, for the majority of the film's remaining time. Her subsequent empowerment through the worker's union is supposed to be a consolation to the viewer. Golikov is told by a government official that Paranya is to be paid for her unused vacation days in addition to him serving jail time. Unfortunately this doesn't come off as much more than cheap ideological comfort in the place of emotionally engaging narrative. For the time period during which it was released, I can understand how the film was successful. The film is technically polished and has a couple of set pieces that are incredibly well done (the stair case with its strata of life and the aforementioned duck chase).In addition, the film is fairly informational regarding the rights of the common worker, allowing it to serve as a simple educational tool for the masses. However, compared to another Soviet film like Bed and Sofa, its unabashed tendentiousness blankets its potential as a truly rewarding work of entertainment or art.