At CINEMA REBORN - David Heslin's introduction to the Melbourne screening of THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME (Kira Muratova, USSR, 1989)

 Editor's Note: This is the fourth transcript of an introduction to a program in the Cinema Reborn 2026 season. Previous introductions published by Margot Nash on the Australian Social Realism program,  CJ Johnson on One Hour with You  and Barrie Pattison on The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul can be found if you click on the author's names.

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Kira Muratova

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes of The Asthenic Syndrome  that “From beginning to end, this movie comes at you like a tidal wave.” If that sounds like it could be either an exhilarating or rather unpleasant experience, I hope I can provide a little context here to help you swim through this brilliant but very unconventional film. 

The best place to start might be to say something about its director, Kira Muratova. Born in 1934 to Romanian parents in an area now within the borders of Moldova, she began making films in the early 1960s with her husband, Aleksandr Muratov, before launching a solo directorial career that would span nearly 50 years. Much of that time was spent in Odesa, and specifically the Odesa Film Studio, which had been famous for producing the early works of Alexander Dovzhenko, among other pioneering Ukrainian filmmakers. 

By 1989, Muratova had already been making feature films for two decades, but she was mostly unknown abroad thanks in part to the suppression of her early films – particularly her 1971 masterpiece The Long Farewell, (Cinema Reborn, 2022) which was banned for its failure to adhere to the dictates of social realism. Like many iconoclastic Eastern European directors of the time, her career throughout the 1970s and early 1980s existed in tension with authorities. She spent years on end unable to make films, and when she did, the interventions were often intolerable; indeed, her 1983 film Among Grey Stones received such a butchered final cut that she refused to be credited. 

That all changed with glasnost; keen to atone for the sins of their predecessors, a newly appointed film commission rushed to revive her work. Her first two features, Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell, were finally allowed to be screened at festivals abroad across 1987 and 1988, where they received major awards, and The Asthenic Syndrome was fast-tracked into production. But her troubles with the censors weren’t over: The Asthenic Syndrome would go on to receive the honour of being the only Soviet-produced film to be banned during glasnost, having been suppressed for six months due to Muratova’s refusal to remove the profanity in a scene on a train at the very end of the film. After the film was screened at festivals abroad to acclaim, the Soviet censors relented and finally released it without cuts in April 1990.

But it’s hard to imagine that this could have been their only misgiving about the film. The Asthenic Syndrome is an extraordinary satirical portrait of life during the last spasms of the Soviet Union; what it depicts is no less than a society and individuals within it in a state of collapse. Basic amenities don’t work; day-to-day interactions are guided by haphazard, meaningless aggression; aspirational slogans in the classroom are met with indifference. It’s not for nothing that Adam Curtis gave the subtitle TraumaZone to his recent documentary series about this period. Those who lived through these years in the USSR and its successor states – in which scarcity prevailed, institutions crumbled and organised crime was rife – know all too well that that is no exaggeration.

Even in the somewhat heightened, darkly comical version of that reality that The Asthenic Syndrome presents, there is an aspect of documentary. Thus you have some of the film’s stranger excursions, such as a scene in which four women go to look for a lost dog at a pound; we’re subsequently treated to a rather harrowing montage of dogs crowded together in squalid cells that seems to step outside of the film, even ending in an on-screen quotation as if we’d just watched an RSPCA ad. For Muratova, a vegetarian, this sequence indicts her society as a whole; if the most vulnerable are treated this way, what hope is there for humans? But the goal here isn’t didactic; indeed, Muratova approvingly cited Tolstoy for revealing, in her words, “the naivety of the intelligentsia who believe that culture and art can transform the world”. In contrast, Muratova says, “I’m not out to re-educate; I aim only to reflect.”

There’s a lot of bleakness in those reflections, but also a great deal of beauty. Muratova often uses the music of Schubert as a lyrical counterpoint here; and there’s a particularly lovely sequence with a slightly out-of-tune rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” that I think sums up the film’s melancholic humour.

The Asthenic Syndrome has quite an unusual structure: in a sense, it’s two films in one. The first, which goes for about forty minutes, follows middle-aged doctor Natasha, played by Olga Antonova, whose husband has just died, through the streets of Odesa in black-and-white; in the second, in colour, it’s revealed that the first was a film-within-the-film that a schoolteacher, Nikolai, played by co-writer Sergei Popov, has been sleeping through in a cinema. Contrary to what some might assume, Popov was primarily responsible for devising Natasha’s story, whereas Muratova claimed to identify most closely with the character of Nikolai.

Both of these characters have their own struggles: Natasha, in her grief, lashes out at everyone within arm’s reach; Nikolai, on the other hand, a sensitive intellectual who fancies himself a writer, is narcoleptic, and when awake shuffles through life in a detached manner. Both seem to be suffering in their own way from the syndrome of the title: asthenia, or a weakness that renders them unable to function properly. But this is clearly an infirmity shared by everything and everyone that surrounds them, and there is little hope for recovery.

Jane Taubman, whose 2005 monograph on Muratova is still one of the key English-language studies of her work, says of The Asthenic Syndrome that “Muratova’s triumph is in making apocalypse palpable.” So, with that, I’d like to welcome you all to the end of the world – or the end of a world, with the caveat that all empires in decline eventually come to resemble one another.