MELODY FOR A STREET ORGAN

KIRA MURATOVA, 2009

The following is a stream-of-consciousness reflection upon rewatching this film some thirteen years down the track; notes scribbled then reshaped into something vaguely coherent — not unlike the sprawling, impressionistic style of the film, frankly.

A hand on an icy windowpane of a fake train is the dream-like opening image of what will be a waking nightmare for the two central characters in Kira Muratova’s superb but demanding Melody For a Street Organ, in which artifice and theatricality play a crucial role. Throughout the film, Alyona (a 10-year-old girl) and Nikita (her 8-year-old brother) are ushered out of every building they wander into in their desperate search for their father. Even the most public spaces effectively function as enclaves of power and privilege, something these abandoned waifs have no access to or protection against.

It’s Christmas, the season of goodwill to all – so long as the price is right. Hawkers peddle ‘Italian-made’ fake trees and cheesy biblically-themed postcards (one of which pointedly depicts ”the slaughter of the innocents”, a thematic inference one intuitively knows to file away) as minstrels entertain with carols proclaiming Salvation and Hope. All the while, the outside world steadily devours itself.

Alyona and Nikita are about to encounter a brutal landscape populated by wild dogs (literally and figuratively), a conscience-free zone of cruelty, corruption, and decadence, where morality is lost to avarice, and where the destitute roam the streets delivering prophetic rants that damn all and sundry as if their words are being streamed directly from The-Good-Lord-Above. So begins Kira Muratova’s unambiguous, excoriating portrait of callous self-interest.

Muratova signals the pattern that will repeatedly befall her young innocents early in the film. After being thrown off the train (the first of many instances where the children are shunned, pushed around, or made to feel unwanted and unwelcome), they are set upon by a gang of kids who steal Nikita's coat. Soon after, Nikita falls into a hole. When Alyona tries to help, he hits her. Falling back into the hole, he cowers and cries. She jumps in to console him, and they share a rare moment of affection. In a sense, they never leave this hole.

Frustrated at every turn, everyone these lost innocents encounter will wield whatever power they possess with total indifference, if not vampiric relish. Those who don’t are either drunk or mad. Even the chance discovery of a large foreign bill (a potentially life-changing sum) proves useless (the kids can’t convert it to local currency due to their age), acting as a conduit for more humiliation and betrayal.

From a brief description, one could easily misconstrue Melody For a Street Organ as a sentimental mid-brow crowd-pleaser about kids looking for love in a cruel world, but nothing could be further from the truth. Muratova’s approach is rigorously unsentimental. An absurdist, slightly grotesque theatricality keeps pathos at bay while leaving room for genuine compassion. These kids are not naturally loveable. There is nothing cute about them. One senses that they could, at any moment, turn feral. It’s a device that keeps the film focused and free of emotional pleading. Muratova has points to make, and she holds her ground with a firm grip. Right from the opening sequence, one knows one is in the hands of an artist entirely in control.

The world Muratova presents is noisy and chaotic, but there are moments when she slips into powerful silence, dead hard silence, usually in conjunction with tracking shots, such as the one past a line of 30-something men sitting at computers, safe in comforting escapism of virtual worlds. Silence is again used to great effect when Alyona and Nikita peer into the home of a bourgeois family celebrating Christmas. This sequence recalls the stylistic characteristics of silent cinema. Then, a crane shot returns them to the chaos of their Kafkaesque journey, like Hansel and Gretel chasing Alice’s rabbit down holes of systemic indifference, passing one mad-hatter’s tea party after another. There is no room at any inn, no guiding light in the heavens, no safe haven in a lowly manger for these homeless orphans.

Traipsing aimlessly through the snow, the children stumble into a surreal indoor garden of lush Rousseau-like foliage with a touch of Maurice Sendak’s “Where The Wild Things Are”. They climb some stairs and find themselves in an auction house, a room of colour and splendour that fills them with wonder and delight. Here, they (and we) encounter the street organ of the title with its repetitive and unsettling melody. This off-kilter, carnivalesque theme will loop unrelentingly in the background as the children are ushered out of another off-limits environment among many. The door clicks shut behind them, and once again, they are out in the cold, their brief detour into the magic of childhood proving to be nothing but a fleeting diversion, a cruel reminder of what has been taken from them.

The next scene starts with a conversation between three (wise?) men rummaging through bins outside a shopping mall. “You can sense,” says one of them, “that the tradition of refined gluttony is making a comeback.” “That means society is on the verge of great upheavals.” says another, “Sensitive bourgeois stomachs can feel the cataclysm coming, so they stuff themselves with a gourmet’s gusto.” “Yes, and the Union of French chefs petitioned the Pope to remove gluttony from the list of deadly sins!”

With this witty sequence, Muratova begins her tour-de-force final section, a scathing 50-minute indictment of the inhumanity of corporate consumerism. Everyone is a threat, and everyone is threatened. Even beggars fight to defend their patch, and troughs of unattainable food mock the hungry. Here, Muratova emphasises (among other things) the implicit cruelty of advertising, the fostering of desire for something that cannot be obtained, and the resulting emptiness that converts into perpetual consumption, a perfect breeding ground for psychotic discontent and anger.

There are distinct Felliniesque elements in Melody For a Street Organ, but a more telling touchstone (especially in this final section) could be Jacques Tati’s late 60s masterpiece Playtime. Standing at the entrance to the supermarket — where the beeping of supermarket checkout scanners sounds like the irregular pulse of a very ill hospital patient — Alyona tells Nikita (who is on the verge of giving up) to wait until she returns with food. She tries to reassure him that he is not, as he thinks, mentally stupid. “If you can’t differentiate between cause and effect,” she says, “you fall into a stupor.”

Muratova is undoubtedly addressing the audience here.

As Nikita waits, patting the stray cat he has slipped inside his jacket for comfort, hope seems to come in the form of a wealthy, grandfatherly gentleman, a Santa Claus or St. Nicholas figure, a Godly type who slips money into the boy's pocket. Thinking he has chanced upon the perfect gift for his childless wife, he rings to tell her that she will find a ‘fairy-tale little boy’ waiting for her at the mall. Arriving with a crown on her head and a wand in her hand, she floats in like a fairy Godmother, an Ice Queen, or the Good Witch of the North. Alas, Nikita has again been moved on by security personnel, shuffling through the streets to the strains of a musical theme reminiscent of Nino Rota (Fellini’s great collaborator). “The enormity of space,” thinks the Ice Queen, “So many of us, myriads of stars. Was there ever a little boy? I’d prefer a little girl.”

Caught shoplifting, Alyona is taken to Mall Security, a room decorated with pictures of automatic weapons. As the guards ‘process’ her, a parrot squawks: “It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas! Pay for your purchase! Pay for your purchase!” Alyona pleads with the guards to let her go. “You have to ignore them”, says one of the guards, “It's best to look them in the eye and say ‘screw you’ otherwise they’ll put you off balance.” Forced to watch the security images of her shoplifting, she falls to her knees as the parrot mimics her: “Please let me out of here! Please let me out of here!” Suffering the humiliation of Christ, her passion is complete.

With this sequence, Muratova portrays a perversely dysfunctional system, a consumerist culture shaped by what Stephen Migram (of the infamous Milgram Experiments of the 60s) termed “The Agentic State”, a condition where employees submit to regulation, authority, and the transfer of responsibility, adopting an ethical and moral detachment that ensures that all actions serve the company above all. In return, they are found “Blameless” before their corporate God.

Muratova’s spin on ‘A Christmas Carol’ is an irreligious passion play in which every character is nailed (one way or another) to invisible crucifixes. They are all, in a sense, abandoned children, orphans of the mother country. The film ends on a striking final image, a tableau vivant that mirrors thousands of nativity postcards of a child in a manger surrounded by an awe-struck assembly. The silence of this final shot is spiked by the sound of someone overcome by hiccups, a sound that speaks louder than the barrage of (necessary) words that came before it.

In her earlier masterwork, The Asthenic Syndrome (1989), Muratova portrayed national loss, paralysis and despair in the age of perestroika. Melody For a Street Organ examines a very different, though equally oppressive, regime: the rapacious lust for wealth. Rarely drawing attention to its estimable technical virtuosity, it is a sophisticated, highly cinematic work of art, a ‘melody’ composed to accompany the ever-present rhythm of existential despair, a tune that some viewers will have trouble whistling. This isn't a film for everyone; far from it. It's as confrontational as it is broad and absurd, a vodka-fueled rant against the self-absorbed callousness of contemporary society, as relevant now as ever. While some will find this unrelenting film hard-going, those who are fans of aesthetically and politically rigorous tragi-comic absurdism might find a way to sing along to this discordant wee tune.