The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 5-11
I Am Twenty (1965)
Directed by Marlen Khutsiev
Khutsiev, 91 yesterday, was 34 when he began to shoot his I Am Twenty (the original title was Ilyich’s Gate, referring to a public square in Moscow, which is beguiling as ever at the age of 1000 or so). Made during the Krushchev Thaw—a jazzy, woozy, Stalin-free time—the film was thought by Krushchev himself to have partaken of those joys too much; only in 1989 was Ilyich’s Gate released in its original three-hour-plus cut. Now both versions are screening at MoMA, where I Am Twenty should be seen by anyone who was twenty once, or is, or plans to be. Consider it a New Wave time capsule—the whispered monologues, the poetry, the 35mm, the pleasant anguish of smoking in the empty city street at 2am, not knowing what to live for or how to do it. Khutsiev shoots a May Day parade and manages to leave the bad-faith communism out of it; all that remains is flowers, the girl you saw on the train, the boy from the book stand, the hell with the five-year plan. Elina Mishuris (October 5, 6:30pm; October 6, 4pm at MoMA’s Khutsiev retrospective)