To the modern-day viewer, Fragment of an Empire should have a reverse Good Bye, Lenin! feel. Indeed, the whole sequence of Filimonov (Fyodor Nikitin) returning to unrecognisable St. Petersburg, rebranded as Leningrad, fully deserves to be named Hello, Lenin! The way Filimonov reacts and adapts to the new realities looks pretty comical now but it also must have been so to the Soviet viewers, albeit for different reasons. You’d think that Ermler was taking the mickey, and perhaps he was, for in 1929 it was still permitted. (Ilf and Petrov just started to work on The Little Golden Calf.) Ermler’s satire is at its sharpest in the portrayal of Natasha’s new husband, a “culture worker” and a petty tyrant (Valeri Solovtsov). More subtly and way more subversively, the film shows, through the eyes of Filimonov, the astounding emptiness and inhumanity of “brave new world”.
Some curiosities. Filimonov sees his ex-wife, Natasha (Lyudmila Semyonova), in the window of the express train «Одеса—Харків» (Odesa—Kharkiv). A tram in “Leningrad” carries a warning in Ukranian: «виходити під час руху заборонено», “it’s forbidden to get off while (the tram is) moving”. A constructivist skyscraper in “Leningrad” in fact is the freshly completed Derzhprom building in Kharkiv.
Another one: the page of Société des Amis d’Honoré de Balzac lists Fragment of an Empire as an adaptation of the novella Colonel Chabert. If so, the film draws an interesting parallel between French Restoration and developments in the Soviet Union at the time. The committed Bolshevik Ermler well could have viewed these latter as counter-revolutionary.
This film (a 2018 restored version) was screened as a part of the new cycle Cámara, acción, olvido. El cine, memoria viva of Filmoteca Canaria.
