Третья Мещанская (Bed and Sofa)

Director: Abram Room

Year: 1927

Run-time: 75 min

Source: Kanopy

Bed and Sofa really surprised me.  Regardless of culture or country of origin, films that are this early will adhere to a set of moral standards that only the most child-friendly of films today would.  However, Bed and Sofa could fairly be described as a sex comedy, and a fairly progressive one at that.  It's got a wry sense of humor, but very little cynicism.

The plot shouldn't be spoiled if your interest is peaked, but Bed and Sofa is about a married couple in a tiny apartment who are visited by the husband's friend, who's come to the city to work.  The husband offers him a place in the apartment (against his wife's wishes).  However, while the husband takes a work trip, the wife and the visitor fall in love.  Because the visitor can't keep a secret from his friend, he admits it - the husband, in a surprising move, leaves the new couple and tries to find another place to stay.  However, the city is in the midst of a housing shortage, and there's nowhere for the spurned husband to go but back to the apartment.  The two men and women try to stay amicable.  However, when the woman becomes pregnant, both men balk at raising a child whose paternity is unclear.  They pay for the woman to get an abortion, but while at the clinic (which is a cold and unfriendly place straight out of Juno), she decides she can't go through with it.  She abandons the two men and leaves the city.  The final scene, the most amusing of all, shows the two men happily resuming a bachelor friendship.

The proto-feminist ending is absolutely remarkable, but I'm burying the lede somewhat.  When Bed and Sofa is brought up in film circles, it's because it comes from a remarkable time and place - the Soviet Union, just before the Cultural Revolution.  Bed and Sofa is free of any state propaganda, and in fact could be read as a criticism of Soviet expectations for young men and women.  It would be the last film in a long time to get while to get away with that.

In my last post, I was just remarking how a list like this will favor countries where films have survived.  Early Soviet films have featured heavily on this list, and I've grown to look forward to them, as a fascinating picture into a society we usually only hear about from textbooks.  It would be fascinating to do a more in-depth comparison between this film, which may be a rare, honest glimpse into that culture, and those of Eisenstein, which are more well known and loved.  (Eisenstein and this director Room apparently did not see eye to eye).  But at least in its feminist outlook, Room has an interesting forebear in the pre-Soviet director Yevgeni Bauer, whose films appeared early on in the list.  I'm nowhere near qualified to answer this, but it does make me wonder if the Russians were not more prepared to question and re-analyze the place of the woman in society.