Framed to Perfection XLIII

PRAZDNINY U STAREJ MAMY (1976)

Director: Dusan Kodaj

Cinematographer: Vladimir Jesina

Yes, another cute foreign family film to combat my chronic anxiety and crippling feelings of loss, although I guess they could be “crippling anxiety” and “chronic feelings of loss” too.

Choose your own grammatical adventure, patient reader!

This gentle, pastoral tale is about a creative little boy, I believe he’s into photography, taking time out to visit his grandmother in the country. Whilst there, he reconnects with the local kids, some of whom are a bit too much into playing pranks than feels safe.

“Holiday at Grandma’s” hits all the classic coming-of-age beats, including learning about the past, a first kiss, character-building hard labour, burgeoning physical interest, and frolicking innocently in nature. Ahhh, what more does the human soul need?! I guess you could negatively describe these moments as “cliched”, but, unless you grew up in a war torn country where your life changed drastically from day to day, our childhoods were pretty much all the same.

And we were no worse off for it.

I mean, sure, I grew up in a military family in which moving from town to town did severely affect my mental health and connection to society as a whole, but things were still pretty bog-standard. You know, apart from the fact that there were armed guards at the end of my street and bomb scares every other month and a torch-mirror by the front door so that we could check for explosive devices beneath the family car and a prescription gas mask under the stairs for my dad yet none for his wife and three kids, but I’m sure you can translate all that into a “normal” kid’s own experiences.

On a completely unrelated note, I do wake up screaming every night to this very day.

There’s no English dub or subtitles available for this Eastern European or Russian film, but you don’t really need them. If you’ve ever faced life, even to the smallest degree, then you get the idea of what’s generally going on.

The filmmaking is very 70s, so things overall look pretty hideous, but, once the camera stops fucking zooming in and out for one goddamn second, you actually get the odd beauty shot to cherish.

You can find the film on YouTube here.

Do stay in touch, darlings.

Toodles!