We saw our first film at the San Francisco Film Festival, "Silent Souls." It was Russian. It featured two tormented men traveling through a desolate but beautiful landscape. One man's wife had recently died and he and his friend were taking her body to the Volga River to burn. Little birds, poetry, and arcane rituals involving vast quantities of vodka were involved. It was an erotic film with luminous camera work. One of the most erotic scenes was when the husband tenderly washed his wife's corpse. My reaction to this scene disturbed me because it didn't fit into my idea of how I should react.
Bride, corpse, and prostitute, those were the only female roles: woman as mere bodies and one of them a corpse, at that. Yet she was the most living presence in the film. Compared to her oh-too-solid flesh, the men seemed like ghosts. Yes, the bride/corpse was fat by our standards. She had a Russian peasant's sturdy yet voluptuous form. The two prostitutes didn't fit into our American stereotypes of beauty, either. One had no breasts to speak of; the other was plump and childlike. But they were beautiful and the film was lyrical -- like a poem.
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