The Last Gasps of Indian Summer by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Part One

Set against the backdrop of World War I, the 1917 Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war, the film uses a narrative framing device set later, involving “The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs” (NKVD), a Soviet governmental agency which manages the police, prisons, and work camps. NKVD Lieutenant General Yevgraf Zhivago searches for the daughter of his half-brother Dr. Yuri Zhivago and Larissa ("Lara") Antipova. Yevgraf believes a young worker, Tanya Komarova, may be his niece and explains why.

After his mother's burial, the orphaned child Yuri, who owns only an inherited balalaika, was taken by family friends Alexander and Anna Gromeko to Moscow. In 1913, Zhivago, now a doctor and a poet, becomes engaged to the Gromekos' daughter Tonya after her schooling in Paris.

People's Parties

Joni Mitchell

All the people at this party

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They've got a lot of style

They've got stamps of many countries

They've got passport smiles

Some are friendly

Some are cutting

Some are watching it from the wings

Some are standing in the center

Giving to get something

Photo beauty gets attention

Then her eye paint's running down

She's got a rose in her teeth

And a lampshade crown

One minute she's so happy

Then she's crying on someone's knee

Saying laughing and crying

You know it's the same release

I told you when I met you

I was crazy

Cry for us all beauty

Cry for Eddie in the corner

Thinking he's nobody

And Jack behind his joker

And stone-cold Grace behind her fan

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And me in my frightened silence

Thinking I don't understand

I feel like I'm sleeping

Can you wake me

You seem to have a broader sensibility

I'm just living on nerves and feelings

With a weak and a lazy mind

And coming to peoples parties

Fumbling deaf dumb and blind

I wish I had more sense of humor

Keeping the sadness at bay

Throwing the lightness on these things

Laughing it all away

Laughing it all away

Laughing it all away

Written by Joni Mitchell.

Lara, 17 years old, is seduced by her mother's much older friend/lover, the well-connected Victor Komarovsky. Lara's friend, the idealistic Pasha Antipov, who wishes to marry her, is wounded by mounted police at a peaceful demonstration.

Pasha's wound is treated by Lara, who hides a gun he picked up.

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Learning of Lara's relationship with Komarovsky, her mother attempts suicide. Komarovsky attempts to dissuade Lara from marrying Pasha. She refuses and he rapes her. A traumatized Lara later follows Komarovsky to a party. She shoots him in the arm, and is escorted out by Pasha. Pasha marries her, despite now knowing about her relationship with Komarovsky. They leave Moscow.

During World War I, Yuri, now married to Tonya, becomes a battlefield doctor. Pasha joins up, but is reported missing.

Lara enlists as a nurse to search for him and encounters Dr.

Zhivago. For the next six months, they serve at a field hospital, as unrest grows in Russia after exiled Vladimir Lenin returns. Zhivago and Lara fall in love, but Zhivago remains faithful to Tonya.

After Russia leaves the war, Yuri returns to Tonya, their son Sasha and the widowed Alexander Gromeko in their Moscow house, which had been confiscated by the Soviet government and now houses many other people. Yevgraf, now a Cheka officer, tells Yuri that his poems have been condemned as anti-communist.

Yevgraf provides documents so the family can travel to the Gromekos' country home, "Varykino," located in the Urals near Yuriatin. On a heavily guarded train they travel through

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contested territory where the Bolshevik commander Strelnikov is fighting anti-Communist “White” forces.