Out of Boredom / Z nudhy

The screen adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s story portrays the indifference and cruelty of those swallowed by the abyss of provincial life and the mundane existence of the inhabitants of a small railway station lost in the desolate steppe.

The lonely cook, Aryna, falls in love with a drifter of the railway tracks, Homozov. However, this unexpected feeling of happiness ends tragically for the woman, as the local residents, whose humanity has dulled from boredom and laziness, begin to mock her, while even Homozov joins them. In despair, Aryna takes her own life.

One of the most famous works of the Ukrainian classic director Artur Voitetskyi, who made a name for himself with intimate psychological dramas about the relationships and tragedies of “regular folks.”

Out of Boredom,  like most of Voitetskyi’s other works, stylistically stands out from the average production of the Dovzhenko Film Studio. This film also differs from Ukrainian Poetic Cinema, the heyday of which came in the late 1960s.

The slow narrative style, the landscape orientation of the usual cameraman of Voitetskyi – Valerii Bashkatov — makes the film echo the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni. However, while Antonioni was a songbird of incommunicability in the big city, Voitetskyi’s films usually take place in small towns or villages. It is here, in the leisurely flow of time against the backdrop of the mighty Dovzhenko’s nature, that the great tragedies of his characters unfold.

The legendary Ukrainian-Soviet actress Maiia Bulgakova played the lead role in the film Out of Boredom,  following her most stellar role in Larysa Shepitko’s Wings (1966) a year earlier.