Page 109 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

90 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
Protazanov’s film could scarcely be considered an adaptation of Tolstoi’s novel.
Little, in fact, was retained beyond the title and the names of the main characters,
while the additions amounted to a substantially new narrative embodying very
different themes.
The film begins, in effect, with the novel’s ending and a very different hero. This
Los is a sensitive engineer, far from the ‘Elk’ his name evokes in Russian, whose
fascination with space travel encourages him to day-dream about life on Mars. He
interprets a cryptic message received at a Moscow radio station as coming from
the beautiful Aelita, who he thinks has fallen in love with him. This interplanetary
fantasy becomes increasingly real to Los when he believes his own wife, Natasha,
to be attracted to a suave speculator, Erlich, who is lodged in their apartment.
Natasha works at a reception centre for refugees (the film spans the period 1921—3)
where, apart from Erlich and his scheming wife (soon to seduce Los’s friend
Spiridonov, a fellow space enthusiast), she meets a wounded Red Army soldier
Gusev, who eventually marries his nurse Masha and becomes a helper. 35
Aelita, meanwhile, is imagined by Los to be in rebellion against her father
Tuskub, especially when he curbs her passion for viewing Earth (and Los) through
a new apparatus. Natasha, increasingly neglected by Los, reluctantly accompanies
Erlich to a decadent ball for anti-Soviet elements, while her husband seeks solace
by going to work on a remote construction project. On his return, Los jumps to the
conclusion that she has moved in with Erlich and in despair shoots at her. He flees
to the railway station, but decides to remain in Moscow and disguise himself as
Spiridonov, who has shortly before written to say he is emigrating. He succeeds in
building the rocket ship they had long planned and sets off for Mars, accompanied
by Gusev, now bored with civilian life, and a stowaway–the amateur detective–
Kravtsev, who is investigating Erlich’s swindles and Spiridonov’s seeming
disappearance. When they land, Aelita has arranged for her maid to bring the
visitors to her and she satisfies her curiosity about Earth customs with a kiss from
Los. Gusev charms the maid with his accordion playing, until Tuskub’s militia
arrest her for having murdered, on Aelita’s orders, the astronomer who had
predicted where the ship would land. Kravtsev is taken to the dungeons where the
toiling Martian masses are kept, and are refrigerated when they are not needed.
Momentarily, Los imagines that his wife is still alive and begs her forgiveness.
Meanwhile Gusev successfully appeals to the Martian workers to ‘throw off their
thousand-year hypnosis by the Elders’ and Aelita offers to lead the uprising. But
when the insurgents have overcome the Elders, she persuades them to lay down
their arms, then orders the militia to open fire. Los pushes her off the dais–and
finds that it is his wife he is pushing–before awakening from his dream in the
station where he had gone after the shooting. The original ‘Martian’ message is
revealed as part of an advertisement slogan for tyres! Gusev and his wife, waiting
for a train to the east, follow as he returns to his apartment and discovers Natasha
unharmed. Upstairs the militia are arresting Erlich on suspicion of Spiridonov’s
murder, while Los retrieves the rocket plans that Spiridonov had hidden and
destroys them, telling Natasha that ‘a different sort of work awaits us’.