Hello, It's Me! (Frunze Dovlatya, 1966) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Daniel Wood

Բարեւ, ես եմ
Ես երկար ժամանակ մտածել եմ մեր մասին*

A rediscovered classic of Soviet-era Armenian filmmaking, Hello, It's Me! is both an elegy to those lost in World War Two and a subtle critique of the bureaucratic and political limitations placed on scientists and intellectuals during the postwar period. It's also a fairly bold statement about the problems of the Soviet's center / periphery model of cultural production, the idea that any self-respecting scientist would go work in Moscow because Yerevan (and other SSR capitals) were backwaters. Dovlatya essentially uses particle physics as a parallel to Mosfilm's top-down structure, something that loosened up under Khruschev.

Artyom (Armen Dzhigarkhanyan) wants to study cosmic rays, and he is part of vibrant scientific community in Yerevan. But in the final years of the war and several years afterward, he and his colleagues are badgered about the practical (read: military) applications of their efforts. Artyom and his best friend Oleg (Rolan Bykov) understand that only pure research into the structure of things will gain Soviet science credit on the world stage. And so part of what Dovlatya's film depicts is a nation gradually coming to this realization once the immediate horror of WW2 starts to fade.

To its credit, Hello, It's Me! maintains the consistent point of view of Artyom, how decisions made elsewhere affect his work and life. This includes the fact that his young wife Lyusya (Natalya Fateeva), a Soviet officer, is unexpectedly returned to the front lines in a last-minute change of orders. She never comes back, and to a great extent Artyom pursues his research as a way not only to distract himself but to outrun the past. Much of the second part of his career involves long-gestating plants to build an accelerator, and this pursuit means he is subject to the dual progressions of scientific know-how and political will, two parallel tracks that move at different speeds.

There is a customary Soviet crispness and Constructivist organization to Hello, It's Me! But Dovlatya often combines complex compositions and off-kilter angles with somewhat tremulous camerawork, providing a kind of vibrant potential energy within the frame. The dialectic doesn't move in this film through montage, although the editing is certainly sturdy and well-considered. Instead, many shots combine rigid linearity with small, jittery disruptions, something that could, I suppose, be a metaphor for the molecular motion of the otherwise stable universe.

In the final forty minutes of Hello, It's Me!, something strange happens. The film suddenly shifts perspective, introducing us to a restless young woman named Tanya (Margarita Terekhova, best known as the Mother in Tarkovsky's Mirror). She spies the older Artyom in a crowd and begins following him, entering his hotel room with little explanation. At first it seems that her relationship with another older man has become so stifling that she's simply gone out to find another. But her pursuit of Artyom isn't as random as it seems.

We learn that she is the little girl who we briefly met earlier in the film, someone who had been at a daycare near Artyom's first lab. When Lyusya is deployed, she asks the girl to convey the message to Artyom, which she does. So Tanya is an actual node of connection between Artyom and his dead wife, the last point of contact shared between them. As such, she represents the past that Artyom has tried so hard to leave behind. The eventual relationship between Artyom and Tanya is left inchoate and vague. It's not clear whether it will be a father-daughter bond or something sexual.

The title Hello, It's Me! has no apparent referent until the arrival of Tanya, who is insistent that Artyom must remember who she is. She appears just as he reconnects with Oleg, after many years out of contact. And the film concludes with Oleg's funeral, which was foreshadowed in the opening shots of the film. A crowd gathers in the street to honor Oleg's service to his nation; the role of physicists is now more widely understood. With both Lyusya and Oleg gone, and Tanya in his life to some extent, Artyom is able to move forward by reckoning with the past. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this seems like a particularly vital message sent from Armenia to the rest of the nation. The desired integration of ethnic identities into the post-Stalinist Soviet Union relies not only on embracing the innovation and contributions of Armenians and others, but to face the persecution they experienced not as Soviets but as members of their own ethnicity. Hello, It's Me! issues a challenge, one that the U.S.S.R. was ultimately incapable to taking up.

[*The epigram at the top, translated into the Armenian language, is from Todd Rundgren.]