Bed and Sofa (1927, Abram Room)

73/100

That '86 Soderbergh notebook entry became sex, lies and videotape...and also serves as a perfect logline for the remarkable, relatively little-known Soviet silent feature Bed and Sofa, which doesn't of course involve homemade pornos but is nonetheless arguably even more fucked up in certain respects. While director Abram Room doesn't have a surname that looks particularly Russian to Westerners (no -sky or -ovich), the film reveals itself as Russian (or at least Russian-influenced) almost immediately, introducing Nikolai (Nikolai Batalov, whose facial mannerisms and general attitude kept making me think of Joel McHale) doing his morning exercise via a cycled series of discrete shots showing arms only: barbell thrust out to the left, barbell thrust out to the right, both barbells thrust overhead, repeat. Very Eisenstein. Similarly offbeat is the first-act narrative structure, which, after also presenting Nikolai's put-upon wife, Lyudmila, starts juxtaposing their domestic routine/spats with the arrival in Moscow by train of another man, Vladimir, who's evidently looking for a job. Understanding how movies work, we wait to see how these three characters will connect...but Room skips past what would ordinarily be the Inciting Incident (per screenwriting guides). Instead, Lyudmila looks up at one point and is startled to see Vladimir suddenly just there, standing in her apartment with an expectant expression. It's no less disorienting for us than it is for her, and only then does Nikolai emerge to explain that Vladimir's an old war buddy who he's invited to stay with them for a while until he gets settled. (Again, that's more or less the sex, lies setup, except those two guys knew each other from college rather than the army.) For a while, events progress as basic dramaturgy dictates, with Nikolai going out of town on business and Lyudmila growing intrigued by Vladimir—partly because he does exciting stuff like take her on an airplane (very big deal in 1927, her first time), but also partly because Nikolai had smugly expressed no worry about what the two of them might get up to while he's away, as if she wouldn't dare to even feel attraction toward another man. It's a fairly spite-fueled fling, really.

It's what happens after Nikolai returns and discovers he's been cucked that makes Bed and Sofa one helluva bizarre melodrama. Though first we get the extraordinary moment, unthinkable from Hollywood, in which Nikolai, still oblivious, and having returned home earlier than expected, does the hands-over-eyes "Guess who?" bit on Vladimir, causing Vladimir, who assumes it's Lyudmila, to turn and kiss Nikolai passionately on the lips.

This fails to tip brick-dumb Nikolai, who's amused but not at all suspicious. Doesn't matter, as Vladimir feels guilty and immediately confesses. Which sets in motion a reversal both hilarious and poignant, as Nikolai angrily storms out, but later, unable to find or afford lodging on a rainy night, returns to the apartment and takes up residence on the couch, while Vladimir moves permanently to the marital bed (and starts referring to Lyudmila as his wife). Having coincidentally just rewatched The Third Generation, I find myself imagining what sadomasochistic direction Fassbinder might have taken this scenario; Room (who co-wrote the script with the much more Russian-sounding Viktor Shlovskiy) doesn't quite make it that ugly, but the character psychology catches you off guard. One sequence actually reminded me of a Kids in the Hall sketch about a Kevin McDonald character named Billy Dreamer, who keeps having ludicrously low-key reveries (watching a band on TV, he imagines himself not in the band but watching from a comfier seat)—here, it's Nikolai driven mad in his initial exile, hallucinating images of Vladimir cackling in triumph as he enjoys Nikolai's favorite rocking chair. And eventually the male rivals buddy up again, leaving Lyudmila to now feel ignored and disrespected by two assholes rather than just one. Less compelling, for me, was Bed and Sofa's perhaps inevitable pregnancy complication, which follows Lyudmila to an abortion clinic (startling to see that acknowledged in an almost century-old film, though it was probably more commonplace outside of the U.S.) and gets pretty didactic about depicting it as a hellscape. But the film recovers with an ideal, surprisingly feminist ending, and if Room doesn't strike me as any kind of formal wiz (isolated bits of nifty montage, nothing else special), I'm now curious about whether he regularly tweaked propriety this hard.