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The Greatest Movie You'll Never See! - Goncharov (1973)
I believe that I have made the most comprehesive video essay on the 1973 film Goncharov that has been released to date, including restored footage, interviews, and rare behind-the-scenes insight into this forgotten film.
More info below the cut
It's honestly so clever how the Lumineers referenced Goncharov (1973) in this song
When Katya and Goncharov have that one big fight and she's challenging him on his hesitance to stakeout Ice Pick Joe's hideout, and she yells, "So when he comes after me, will you just dig my grave, or will you rail against my dying day?!" Knowing the context honestly adds so much more depth to this lyric.
a/n: I realized half-way through that this is less of an interpretation of canon, but more of an interpretation of an interpretation of canon. so, like, take this with a grain of salt? also this has slight nsfw (the characters connect sexual intercourse with gun violence and I wanted to examine that)
I'm sure that someone's said this before, but for me, the "his wife has filled the house with chintz" quote from Tumblr and the "of course I love you. I tried to shoot you" quote from Goncharov (1973) have the same energy.
His wife has filled the house with chintz. To keep it real, I fuck him on the floor.
In this reblog of "his wife", @headspace-hotel points out the contrast between the connotation here of chintz as something fake and flimsy and the idea of "fuck[ing] on the floor" as carnal and real.
The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.”
KATYA: Of course we're in love. That's why I tried to shoot you. GONCHAROV: If we were really in love, you wouldn’t have missed.
I really like this interpretation of Katya's death scene, written by @frstcorinthians. The way I read it, it feels like she says, "Of course we're in love," almost sarcastically, or even mockingly.
I'd like to point out that Katya only shoots at Goncharov because he shot at her first. "Katya is a good shot. Almost perfect, even. But now, the bullet goes wide; she sees it skim past Goncharov’s temple. They're one for one." In this violence/love metaphor I'm using here... Katya can love. She loves brilliantly. But for Goncharov, she misses (can't reciprocate). It's clearly different for Goncharov. He explicitly says (in canon!), "If we were really in love, you wouldn't have missed," before shooting her in the neck. A perfect shot.
I think that Katya engages in relationship with Goncharov because she wants to prove that they are equals. One for one - you shoot me, I shoot you - you love me, I love you. But Goncharov really does love Katya; likewise, he really does shoot her.
I feel like Katya is taking Goncharov's love (house) and turning it into a game (filling it with chintz).
I also want to bring this quote (from the fic) to focus:
She doesn’t feel the bullet go into her, not really. All she feels is a vague sense of warmth in the juncture of her neck and shoulder and the exchange of the bullet’s motion pushed into her body. Not so different from sex, then. Here, as there, she goes with the force Goncharov enters into her, relaxed.
So, with the idea that the bullet is some sort of metaphor for penetration, and then we know that Katya doesn't really feel the energy of that bullet versus...
He feels Andrey’s hands around his shoulder as he eases him down to the ground. In his final moments, he thinks he feels Andrey’s thumb stroke gently across his shoulder. Maybe it’s his dying mind’s attempts to self-preserve, a flashback to the night before Goncharov’s wedding, when Andrey’s thumb made the same motion in their post-coital bliss.
... this connection of the intimacy between Andrey and Goncharov? Katya doesn't seem to feel this intimacy, but Goncharov seems to feel it about Andrey. When Katya compares the bullet to penetration, it's because she thinks that both are insignificant.
Goncharov doesn't compare the act of killing to intercourse, instead he compares the intimacy of betrayal and intercourse. Andrey's betrayal feels intimate to Goncharov. It feels real.
So if Katya is filling the house with chintz by not reciprocating Goncharov's love/bullet, Andrey is keeping it real by fucking him (stabbing him) on the floor (the bridge).
Goncharov through a transmasc lens
The deep symbolism of violence as love ("If you really loved me you wouldn't have missed" and how Andrey didn't miss) is accentuated if you watch the movie and imagine Goncharov or Andrey as trans.
If you imagine Andrey as trans, it explains Katya's hatred for him as his former lover as well as her chemistry with Sofia, and adds a layer to their animosity. It also adds depth to Andrey's choices and why he falls more easily into the tropes of toxic masculinity in his attempts to prove himself as real a man as Goncharov throughout the film. He is often in the shadow of Goncharov I think it works as well with Andrey constantly comparing himself to Goncharov as the ideal of what kind of man he wants to be. He both wants to be with Goncharov, and wants to BE Goncharov. Killing him at the end of the movie is an act of consumption, consumation, and replacement.
However, if you imagine Goncharov himself as trans, then that adds a layer on to why Katya ultimately rejected him, and why he only found true companionship with Andrey; why Andrey was the only one who could ultimately fulfill "love" in the way the movie demanded. Andrey accepted Goncharov for who he was; and that obsessive love met its end as it only can in such tragedies.
There’s some interesting tension with regards to Katya and Goncharov’s inconsistent heights.
See, Robert Di Niro and Cybill Shepard are both around the same height, and I know it’s common practice in movies to mess around with camera angles and apple boxes and platform shoes and such to make the man look taller. It doesn’t always mean anything.
But given how much of her story is about Katya’s identity, like the struggles of leaving her home country. We see her practice in the mirror, trying to get rid of her accent. Erasing a part of herself in order to be taken as something more than just a foreigner.
Then there’s her struggles in her marriage. We see so much of how Katya yearns to have this connection and then Goncharov, well. I think Goncharov does care for her but damn if he isn’t terrible at showing it. Sure he gives her plenty of expensive baubles, but does he spend time with her? Or show appreciation for who she is as an individual?
When her main narrative is all about how she’s been reduced to just the stereotypical sexy Slav trophy wife it feels real fitting how much the camera seems to reduce her too.
And then there’s the high heels. Sometimes it feels like she’s using them to push back, take up space. Most notably when she and Goncharov have their big argument and for once she’s taller than him, the clack of her heels on the floor is loud, unapologetic.
And yet is she really asserting her identity with those heels? They’re part and parcel of the hyperfeminine sex-kitten ideal she’s so trapped in. (And no wonder people ship Katya/Sofia when one of the only scenes where we see Katya dressed down and looking comfortable is with Sofia)
And the theme continues when later, Katya, standing at the top of the stairs and looking down at Goncharov, shoots him. But the way she’s towering over him is just another illusion. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t actually kill him.
And then all this messing around with height culminates in how, during their last conversation, he’s standing on the ground, and she’s wearing flats. There’s no weird camera angles, and they finally see each other eye to eye.
Is anyone else obsessed with how subtly important eye contact is in Goncharov?
Have you noticed how many times he says some form of “look at me” to katya? How, whenever andrey is in a scene his eyes seems to slowly maneuver from object to person to object, as if he’s scanning meaningless information, UNTIL goncharov is in the scene and suddenly his eyes follow him like he’s something worth studying? And what gets me most, how katya, the person who refuses to look at goncharov in the eye unless he all but begs, the woman who has never had the opportunity to yearn for a man because the men do all the yearning for her, looks at sofia like she’s hung the stars and moon, to the point sofia even says something!!! THE DIRECT PARALLELS BETWEEN GONCHAROV’S “look at me, why can’t you ever look at me” AND SOFIA’S “you can’t look at me like that, why do you insist on stopping my heart,” like yeah it was probably meant as a throwaway gag, the way it was said after sofia found katya drunk (don’t even get me STARTED on how katya hid the fact that she was prescribed medication for a preexisting condition from goncharov because she refused to be seen as weak but as soon as she sees sofia’s face in her weakest moment she collapses into her arms and sobs, like???) but that aside it paints such a lovely picture i can hardly stand it.
Heteronormative speculation in the film critic industry has always painted that scene as proof that katya really does care for goncharov because of the flashbacks to him in the middle of her talking to sofia and moments before The Kiss™️, i’ve seen the same take so many times “she was hallucinating that it was goncharov in front of her, not sofia,” but that makes literally no sense considering the way she acts around him for the rest of the film.
The flashbacks were all times that we’d already SEEN in the movie, except the beginning few which were of a younger goncharov, before the beginning of the movie, perhaps before they’d fled russia even. It showed a story, each change in memory was one of him mentioning her always being in her own head, or not paying attention, or even the one scene everyone knows and loves where he asks her what she’s thinking about. The way the first few were grouped together, then became broken up by glimpses of sofia, because the answer to the question “what are you thinking about,” changed as soon as sofia stepped into the picture. She used to dream of freedom from familial pressure, from her husbands line of work, from her countries political agenda, but recently freedom feels less like a pair of wings and more like long brown hair and warm eyes that she can’t help but stare into.
Katya’s character being so underdeveloped in favor of goncharov and andrey mentally fucking for a few more minutes is absolutely deplorable, all i want is for her to find gay peace!
(Btw if you remember any scenes that have to do with the importance of eye contact in the movie that i forgot to mention here, feel free to add on!)
I love Sofia. I know the movie was made in the 70s and she was meant to be the very picture of the problematic lesbian character, seducing katya away from her heterosexual marriage and converting her to a life of sin, but I also believe that as much as she embodies this stereotype, she also subverts it by having her impact on katya be a positive one overall.
Goncharov and katyas marriage is shown to be a struggling one— I don’t think it’s loveless but circumstances have certainly had their effect on their relationship. Where Katya is tied down—by her marriage and by her involvement with the mafia and by her rigid adherence to societal norms, Sofia to her embodies freedom, and Sofia shows her that freedom by showing her that traditional values aren’t the only way. There’s always another option.
This is demonstrated in the scene where she asks katya to run away with her, showing again that there will always be another option, that she’s not limited to the frame that society has put her in. And to connect with someone so deeply, and to have them show you new meaning to life that you never thought possible— it’s everything. With Sofia, katya is no longer boxed in by her preconceived notions on what she thought life was and instead finds new richness in life with her.
And in the end, even after Sofia’s died, she’s still what gives katya the strength to go through with their plans and fake her own death, taking her life and death into her own hands and choosing freedom over all else.
it ties into the cyclical nature of the film and the film's whole thing about patterns/cycles and breaking them. goncharov tries (and ultimately fails) to break the cycle of violence but katya is such an interesting opposition to that bc through sofia she actually manages to get out of the life she's living. the idea of sofia as someone who was introduced as a throwaway side character, who was never meant to have such a big impact but instead ended up being the literal representation of the way out means so much to me
Guys look
LITERALLY GONCHAROV AND ANDREY OMG???
