Soviet accordions and intense staring: My review of Grain (1934)

If you want to spend an hour watching dusty Soviet youth aggressively smile at an accordion, then yeah, Grain is actually a blast. 🌾

Anyone who loves weird, early sound-era experiments or propaganda that feels like a feverish musical will have a great time. If you can't stand loud, tinny singing and heavy-handed collective farming politics, please stay far away.

I honestly didn't expect to be so mesmerized by a movie about agricultural productivity. But here we are.

The Accordion of Destiny

The whole plot basically revolves around this kid played by Nikolai Plotnikov who gets a brand new accordion. Suddenly, he's the most popular guy in the village, which apparently is a huge threat to the local kulaks.

The music is constant. Its scratchy, loud, and feels like it was recorded inside a tin can, but the energy is infectious.

There is this one scene where Sofya Garrel is singing and the camera just pushes in so close you can see the sweat on her forehead. It's incredibly intense for a movie about harvesting wheat.

Vaguely Aggressive Joy

Everyone in this village is just so loudly happy when they are working. They swing their scythes in perfect rhythm like they're in a Broadway show, not doing backbreaking manual labor.

It lacks the massive, sweeping drama of Hollywood silent epics like The Big Parade, but the raw, unpolished enthusiasm here is something else entirely. It feels much more intimate, even if it is trying to sell you on a political ideology.

At one point, a guy gets so excited about a tractor arriving that he literally hugs the wheel. I laughed out loud at that. The tractor didn't even seem to be moving that fast, but the edit makes it look like a spaceship just landed.

Some things that kept me awake:

• The weirdly long reaction shots of horses. Seriously, the horses get better close-ups than some of the actors.
• The villainous rich guys who just sit in dark rooms looking incredibly grumpy. They don't even have to do anything bad, their faces do all the work.
• Emma Tsesarskaya has this amazing, fierce screen presence. She doesn't walk into a scene, she storms into it.

The movie is barely an hour long, which is perfect because the constant accordion playing might have given me a headache if it went on any longer. It just sort of ends when the harvest is done, without much of a traditional climax.

It is definitely a relic of its time, but it’s got this strange, clumsy charm that modern polished films completely miss. Definitely worth a look if you want something totally out of the ordinary.