Autumn Marathon
by Georgi Daneliya
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Evgeni Leonov, Marina Neyolova, Natalya Gundareva, Nikolai Kryuchkov, Oleg BasilashviliDirector: Georgi Daneliya
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Russian (Original Language)
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-06-25
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Autumn Marathon
Movie Review: This is worthy competition to "The Conformist" by Bernardo Bertolucci
Summary: 5 Stars
The film should be watched along with "The Conformist" by Bernardo Bertolucci that treats this theme from a different angle.
In no way this is a film about Soviet life and/or Leningrad although that's were the action take place. This is a brilliant film about conformism. Place and time are actually immaterial to the idea of the film in the same way as in "The Conformist" by Bernardo Bertolucci. You can easily imagine the same situations and the same people in Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sacks or the Congress (especially in the Senate; talk about lobbists here ;-)
Conformists are people who are unduly influenced by other people. This influence occurs in both small groups and society as a whole. In the USSR it also was also (at least partially) the result of direct social pressure to confirm to the ideology of the ruling gang.
But such behavior also is affected by personal traits and the main character of the film is something like the "ideal conformist". Such people are overly affected by expectations of others to the extent that they systematically betray their own interests and behave like a marionette in the hands of the person which whom they currently interact. That's what the film is about. It a very sad comedy with huge amount of psychological truth in it. Some moments are even difficult to watch to the absurdity and at the same time extreme realism with which behavior of such people depicted.
We can only speculate is this due to high insecurity, or specific personal traits (including what is commonly called "weakness of character"). But at the same time the guy is still pretty socially successful and that suggests that unwillingness to conform (typical to revolutionaries of various sort; see the film "How the Steel Was Tempered") also carries with it the very real risk of social rejection. In the film extremes meet. In some aspects conformity can be seen as a safe means of avoiding responsibility (and bullying) as well as attempt to make a peace with often confrontational peers. But as we can see from the film in its extreme it turns to something completely opposite.
A very telling part of the film is the part when our main character rebels against his own conformism and how soon he retreats into his usual stereotyped behavior. In a way there is no escape from this role and that makes the end of the film somewhat tragic.
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