The Peach Thief
Awards&Festivals:
Special award, Best Actress (Nevena Kokanova),
Best Actor (Rade Markovic) – National Film Festival – Varna’ 64
Director: Valo Radev
The Kingdom of Bulgaria, 1918. For a sixth year now, the country has been bleeding profusely in three wars in a row. The First Balkan War, waged against Turkey for the sake of the Bulgarian lands within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. The Second Balkan War against Serbia and Greece to annex those lands. And ultimately, the WWI, which Bulgaria lost along with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hunger, exhaustion, typhus and desperation reign across the country.
The merciless time is choking in its lethal embrace a man (Rade Markovic) and a woman (Nevena Kokanova). Young though they are, they feel like middle-aged people. First Lieutenant Ivo is a Serbian, who used to teach music; he is a prisoner of war in a camp nearby the town of Veliko Turnovo. Lisa is the childless wife of the provost-marshal of the town, who has loyally given herself to the long-standing routine of her marriage. She is rare to walk out of her villa in the suburbs and the peach garden fenced with barbed wire the way the camp is. He whiles away his time holding philosophic conversations with a French captain and frequents in his breakaways from the camp in search for food. She feels profound compassion both for Bulgarian orphaned kids and the emaciated foreign prisoners of war. He has buttons from different countries on his tunic, as “button wage no wars with each other.”
Lisa surprises Ivo while he picks peaches in her garden. The peach thief and the mistress of the garden fall in love with the resurrecting power of the first, late and only love, inevitable as the wind and the rain are, with the fence impotent to stop them. A love, as doomed and cursed, as the place, the people and the time.
The Peach Thief is the Bulgarian Casablanca. This unbowed to time national classic work, is made with the melancholic realism of Jean Renoir, with American perfectionism as regards the details, and with Slav sensitivity to the tacit sadness of protagonists, close to that of Chekhov and Tolstoy. The powerful sincerity of the narration and the talent of the filmmaker to stand for his freedom of an artist, kept the film intact from the Communist censure. Fortunately, the fanatics of the then regime just underestimated the picture. Made in 1964, The Peach Thief broke through the Iron Curtain by a miracle, to vie at the Venice festival along with the Deserto Rosso by Antonioni, II Vangelo secondo Matteo by Pasolini and Une Femme Mariee by Godard. Form that time on the picture wended its way over the world.
