Dovzhenko's films are markedly avant-garde in character. In fact his great masterpiece, Earth is surely the most affordable. Ivan does not seem to me a work at the height of the previous trilogy. Even so, it is an interesting and always surprising film.
I'm not surprised that they didn't enjoy the favor of the authorities: with a clearly propagandistic theme, the director's attitude towards his material is always suspicious, deviant, discordant.
What to say about a film in which the rallies become annoying, and more time is spent capturing the flow of a river; where the most pleasant character is a lazy bum who laughs at everything, while the workers dream of medals as if they were combatants; where every time someone speaks from a tribune it is to give annoying shouts with an emphatic look and speeches of absolutely delirious content. Where everything seems to oscillate between a fulfillment of imposed propaganda duties and a dark avant-garde parody of marked intellectual character.
How to admit in an orthodox Stalinist propaganda film, a deviating structure, with apparently no connected scenes that are often surreal, where we never know what really happens and what happens in the imagination of the protagonists; that contempt for a clear and linear way of storytelling. In the end, the only clearly real thing is the construction of a dam, whose conclusion is hidden from us, where an accident at work costs the life of a worker. But this is a skeleton, disguised in clothes that could not but be most outlandish to the party people.
Even the plot is intentionally confusing. The opposition between a hard-working son who gains proletarian consciousness against the lazy and unbelieving father is complicated when it turns out that there are two young men named Ivan who also work together and two fathers called Stepan, foreman and the other a downright lazy character. Judging by many comments and arguments on the net, including imdb synopsis, it seems that many viewers interpreted that Stepan Shkurat in his role as a slacker is the father of Pyotr Masokha, the blond protagonist, when in fact he is the father of another young Ivan, partner of the first, but who instead of relying only on his ability to work, studies at night to get certified. Dovzhenko clearly plays into it to the confusion, but several scenes make it quite clear. The lazy father sleeps in the room with the young Iván who is studying to become certified, in that scene in which the son denounces his father by phone to the committee for going fishing. Stepan the foreman, the actor Stepan Shagaida, asks his son, the protagonist, in the next scene if he can't sleep.
By the end of the film this is pretty clear, but even so, in the last scene, Dovzhenko plays on this misundertanding.
The film is interesting, with some beautiful scenes, but is clearly inferior to previous films from the filmmaker.
