The Long Farewell was Muratova’s most lyrical film, a delicate, heart-breaking portrait of loneliness and unrequited longing, yet was banned for almost twenty years. The Soviet censors thought the film had a “deliberately complicated style”, too much “absorption with formal experiments” and was “lacking in realism and motivation”; in short, untowardly bourgeois and inusfficiently optimistic in its portrayal of Yevgeniya. Ian Christie notes that The Long Farewell’s “almost unbearable tension is explored in a series of fluid, inventive sequences, which bring visual sophistication with acting and music to match…[that] show Muratova [to be] streets ahead of her (male) contemporaries”. Muratova experimented with editing and her penchant for repetition, describing her iterative process in an interview in 1988:
“In The Long Farewell, the love of editing became a principle. I filmed various scenes several times in order to be able to select the best take, and I used nearly all of that double material. I threw away very little. You will have noticed the many repetitions in the film. This wasn’t planned in advance… Every film has its own life… The material contains one way of editing, one optimal use of all possibilities. That’s what I’m trying to extract.”
Keen to discover new talents, especially actors, many of whom became major stars of Russian cinema, Muratova’s revelation here was Zinaida Sharko, who plays the impulsive and fragile Yevgeniya, turning The Long Farewell into a profound exploration of motherhood, attachment, and femininity. —Elena Gorfinkel
