Garpastum

Garpastum
The Russians still have standards. Not just anybody can invest $200 in a film and get it shown on the festival circuits. There is training to be had for those with the aptitude before being entrusted with a feature film. This is only Alexey Guerman’s second film, but it is the work of a master. And it is the first script written by Alexander Vaynshteyn, a sports journalist, electronics inventor, and producer of musical theatre whose intellectual world is brightened and clarified by the visions of Tolstoy and Chekhov. There are pieces of “the Seagull” and “War and Peace” in “Garpastum,” but it is no pastiche of hand-me-down clichés. Guerman and Vaynshteyn, with the light of genius as their beacon, have penetrated the mystery of the 21st century. Now, as it was in 1914, the world is laying aside its daily life in anticipation of the onset of war. Now, as it was in the beginning of the 20th century, humanity has leapt into a future that will bear little resemblance to the past. “Garpastum” is an ancient ball game which has perpetuated itself through history by taking different forms.

The group of young friends upon whom “Garpastum” is centered play a variant of this game through the upheaval of WWI, keeping their sanity by maintaining this athletic tie with the past while they try to find the money for their own playing field, one that will ensure the survival of this tradition as the nation is crushed by the roll of history across its military defeats. The color is washed out of this emerging world, save for the occasional splotch of dried blood on the face of one who took a ball in the face. The football scenes so are brilliantly staged and filmed that even a viewer unfamiliar with the sport will be able to follow its action, something that can said for exceedingly few movies that dwell on sporting activities. And this in an effort that is not even a sports movie. Rather, it is a portrait of a humanity that stays more or less the same as the surfaces of reality are wiped away in the cataclysm of social and political change.