The works of Balzac give almost perfect shoots in the field of socialist realism. He is one of those writers that was mass-published in the Soviet Union because of his sharply critical attitude towards the bourgeois world. Moreover, Balzac’s manner is not similar to the main interest of the Russian version of critical realism, which constantly tried to derive the formula of the “hero of time”, that is, the hero qualitatively characterizing his epoch, rather than quantitatively present in it as a simple arithmetic majority. The hero is not of quality, but of quantity; he is either written out in a compassionate manner, as the proverbial “little man,” or (in Balzac’s case) a satirical hero. Therefore, Eugene Grande is one of the most representative texts of his “Human Comedy”, and asking for an ideologically verified screen adaptation.
The 1960 film is pretty much like that. The manner of false-classical socialist realism is a way of prophesying in the opposite direction, in relation to the past. Since the historical perspective is completely clear (whether noon is the 22nd century or 17 hours 30 minutes of the 28th), the pages of the past may appear as an illustration of the dark past, when small, medium and large bourgeois tore apart each other like spiders in a jar. Usually, the structure of a complex corpsmire appears in the domestic version. Instead of economic ties, only the voluntarism of the absolute type of miser, in which more is from Theophrastus’s “Haracters” than from the man of his time. In fairness, the film very accurately follows the plot of Balzac’s work, the point is in the very placement of accents, which (according to the same false classical principles) turns characters into types, “social persons”, so, despite the talented actors, the film adaptation turns into a confirmation of the thesis that the bourgeois world consists of ruthless bloodsuckers and – mainly – their victims. The law of typing works from the very beginning, when, in the spirit of the objective theater of Brecht, the actors autorepresent their roles in the first person, sometimes continuing such comments and then for some reason this technique “curtails”, although in the film it is just appropriate, because he carries the indelible seal of theatricalization. And it turns out that the film leans to the film-theater, where special psychologicalization due to the tasks is not required, then pays tribute to acting talents, but the union of a horse and a trembling deer is something not quite artistic.
In other words, the so-called naturalistic line prevailed in the film adaptation, this is the transcription of Balzac through Zola. The main conclusion is not that society itself is imperfect and unjust (Balzac is closer to this version), and is not connected with the very historical perspective, which so triumphantly trumpets the aesthetics of prophecy in the past. Here, as it were, everyone is doomed: both the masters of life and their victims. Therefore, the plot remains to plunge only into darkness, sorrow and doom. In the world of victorious socialism, these are all the illustrations necessary by the law of contrast to dark times, contrasted with the stained glass windows of the thaw era conducting through themselves with the beautiful areas of new buildings-"Khrushchev" and the sunrise, giving icon-painted radiance to the faces of the main characters, fearlessly looking into the same radiant future. But this is already a mythologization of modernity, which must be taken into account by default when watching the film adaptation about the “dark past of mankind”.
6 out of 10