The Peach Thief [Bulgaria 1964]

Крадецът на Праскови
Director: V. Radev
Cinematographer: T. Stoyanov

A tight, stylistically strong film depicting a love story between a Serb POW and a Bulgarian commandant's wife in the last months of the First World War. This is Radev's first film as director, and is one of the early great examples of Bulgarian poetic realism.

Like the other Bulgarian poetic realist films, it is clearly influenced by Kalatozov and Urusevsky's The Cranes Are Flying, but has a different tone and voice. Both films portray the perennial theme of love in a time of war; both end in tragedy. They both also attempt to portray the larger sweep of social events through the story of a couple of individuals. But while Kalatozov accomplishes this through a variety of means including sweeping camera shots taking in 'typical' social scenes, Radev is more subtle about it. The camera is much more restricted to the main characters and events are not so heavily stylised; our concern with wider events is sparked by dialogue among the POWs, reflections on life, the character of Lisa's husband, etc. In other words we are much more seeing the wider picture through the characters rather than around them. As I Am Cuba perhaps demonstrates, Kalatozov seemed to be mainly interested in portraying something very much larger than interpersonal or personal struggles; Radev here manages to do this in a way that keeps the focus on the personal struggles.

The cinematography likewise borrows from Kalatozov and Urusevsky but by no means copies them. There are a few trademark shots and techniques that could almost be called tributes: the use of a character being followed by the camera wending his or her way through the scenery, moving from foreground to background while the camera follows in the foreground to give a sense of depth; shots of characters desperately running a straight line through a thicket; shots of characters desperately running up stairs; and stylised conversations in which character movements and camera rotations punctuate the dialogue as if they were paragraphs. However, these borrowed techniques by no means constitute the entire film; they are combined with a large number of close shots and more gentle tracking shots to make a film that is decidedly not the work of Kalatozov and Urusevsky. Perhaps the most impressive piece of cinematography in the film, in which the camera swings and moves to the rhythm of the commandant drilling his troops, seems to echo or foreshadow the contemporaneously produced shot of the cane farmer cutting cane with his machete in I Am Cuba.

As this film is set before socialism, it does not offer insights into socialist life; however it does have a few interesting comments about the Russian revolution. Ivo, the Serb POW, discusses the 'events in Russia' with his French comrade. The Frenchman is sceptical and says that the Russians have forgotten 1871--the Paris Commune; he says (using chess as an allegory) that every figure must be in its place for there to be a game at all. Ivo responds that perhaps people could make a new game with new figures. The Frenchman responds rather ambiguously with 'Perhaps it would work if everyone were in love'. This is interesting because it is an ambiguous statement about socialism; it is certainly not blind optimism and neither does it reflect blind approbation. One does get the feeling, of course, that certain comments such as 'I wonder if it will always be this way' (i.e. men dying at the front, etc) are intended to foreshadow the sense of the victory of peace in the 1960s. But again, we do not find any kind of triumphalist premonitions. This is in spite of the fact that the film depicts a brief revolt of soldiers against the war, at a time when Bulgaria might have been one of the countries closest to an echo of the Russian revolution of any.

The love story in the film takes centre stage. It is portrayed in a somewhat minimalist way, using only a few interactions to suggest a much longer affair. But this is very effective. We are left emotionally attached to the characters and their relationship and Radev exploits this attachment to make us think about the larger picture. This is emphasised in the last shot of the film which does not close on the lovers and their tragedy, but rather on masses of POWs, reminding us that this story, no matter how personal, is in many respects about an entire generation. Again, for this subtlety, Radev deserves praise. While the film is not stylistically innovative, it takes from other traditions skillfully and tightly integrates plot, cinematography, and acting. It is also a moving story.