A loving film tribute to Russian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko, who died tragically in a car accident in 1979 at the age of 40. This documentary by her husband, Elem Klimov, includes excerpts from all of Shepitko&♯39;s films, and her own voice is heard talking about her life and art.
Elem Klimov&♯39;s grief-stricken elegy Larisa examines the life of his late wife—the film director Larisa Shepitko—through a series of direct-address interviews and photomontages, set against a mournful visual-musical backdrop. Typically, Klimov films his subjects (which include himself and several of Shepitko&♯39;s collaborators) within a stark, snow-covered forest, its tangled web of trees standing in as metaphorical representation of a perhaps inexpressible suffering, the result of Shepitko&♯39;s premature death while filming her adaptation of Valentin Rasputin&♯39;s novella Farewell to Matyora. Interweaving home movie footage with sequences from Shepitko&♯39;s work (Maya Bulgakova&♯39;s pensive plane crash reminiscence from Wings takes on several new layers of resonance in this context), Larisa&♯39;s most powerful passage is its first: accompanied by the grandiose final music cue from Shepitko&♯39;s You and I, Klimov dissolves between a series of personal photographs that encompass Larisa&♯39;s entire life, from birth to death. This brief symphony of sorrow anticipates the cathartic reverse-motion climax of Klimov&♯39;s Come and See, though by placing the scene first within Larisa&♯39;s chronology, Klimov seems to be working against catharsis. The pain is clearly fresh, the wound still festering, and Klimov wants—above all—to capture how deep misery&♯39;s knife has cut.
