All Episodes
Previous Next
April 23, 2015 - Davis Aurini
26:06
Movie Review: The Thief (1997) 2 of 3

My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124207/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The Thief Part 2.
Plot and Character Analysis.
Now the actual plot of this movie is very simple.
And this kind of goes along with what I was saying about Russian literature previously, that it doesn't need a complicated plot because it's not about the plot.
There's really only three characters worth mentioning.
There's the main character, but not the protagonist.
It's the young boy Sonya.
He's the narrator of the film, but he's not the one directing events.
There's his mother, Katya, a single mother, because Sonia's father died shortly after World War II from injuries sustained therein.
And then there's Tolchin, his erstwhile stepfather, her pretend husband, the protagonist of the film, whom you're constantly torn back and forth.
Is this man a monster or not?
The story follows the three of them.
They first meet on a train.
Katya and Sonia are just traveling on the train.
They have nowhere to go.
They have no family to support them.
Sonya was given birth to in a muddy ditch when she was walking between towns some years ago.
He's about eight years old, I believe, in the movie.
They're just traveling when they encounter this handsome soldier, this very confident and debonaire Tolchin, who, within minutes, within hours of meeting the woman, meeting Katya, has her in the back of the car making love to her.
So when they arrive in the first town, they wind up renting a room, and he says, like, listen, my army pays a little bit back right now, but I'm here with my wife and son, even though they just met about six hours ago, or maybe 12 hours ago, on the train.
They move in, they rent a room, and pretend that Sonia is his son, and Katya's his wife.
Then after a week or so, even though this guy, he didn't have the paperwork for this, but he had a soldier's uniform.
He looked like a respectable man, and after all, he had a wife and child, didn't he?
No scam artist would have that.
He buys them all tickets to the circus and then goes back to the property to clean out all the silverware and steal anything of value and jump a train to the next city.
Sonia happens to catch him doing all of this, and so he brings along Katya and Sonia.
And this happens again and again.
This is his modus of operandi.
Move to a new town, pretend to be a soldier, rent a room without paying for it.
And then, once everybody trusts you, steal the silverware and move on.
Throughout all of this, you see Sonia being very torn between desperately wanting a father figure and yet hating this father figure for the way he treats him and the way he treats his mother.
Finally, at the end of the film, he winds up, as an older boy, when he's about 14 or so, he winds up finding Toljan again after he's been to prison, after he's been up to Siberia, and he's still running the same old scams, but now he's shabby and burned out.
And he shoots him.
And that's where the story ends, the very bleak nothing, nothing, nothing.
That Sonia no longer knows what to believe in.
He can't believe in Toljan.
His mother died pursuing Toljan, doing whatever he wanted.
And Toljan, who claimed that Stalin was his father, what's this young boy alone in the world supposed to believe now?
That his mother died pursuing a man that didn't love him or love her.
And that he ultimately killed that man, but felt nothing, felt no satisfaction.
He was just numb to the whole thing.
And Russia, the orphanage that he lives at, what's he supposed to feel about any of that?
And I think this is really what we find with the manosphere.
There is a bit of a nihilistic edge to the whole thing, a desperation for fatherhood, of trying to look at what masculinity used to mean and rebuild ourselves along those lines.
I trust you've watched it.
I hope you have.
Absolutely amazing film.
I think the best way to take this all apart is to look at the characters one by one.
Look at Sonia, who's the narrator.
Katya, who is very passive throughout the whole thing, and finally, Toljan, and ask what sort of man he really is.
So first, let's start with Sonia.
You know, there are some psychological studies that I don't have handy, but I was reading about them, that even as infants, girls are more likely to cry, more likely to demand attention, whereas infant boys are far more nervous.
They don't complain as much.
They put up with more, and they're more afraid.
And if you have any nieces and nephews, you've seen this.
That little girls have this insane confidence about them.
They understand their importance, their innate value to all of society.
Whereas young boys are still very afraid.
They are desperate for love, but they are very cautious because they don't feel like they deserve this.
And you see this in Sonia.
He is so desperate for a man to look up to.
Early he talks about having these visions, these dreams of seeing his father, whom he never saw in real life.
His father was dead before he was born.
But he keeps seeing these flashes.
He needs this man that cares about him, that will protect him.
And eventually, eventually he falls for Tolzhen as his new father.
Even though the man is frequently abusive, although he's also frequently kind in his own way.
Any sort of love for a young boy, any sort of masculine acceptance, masculine approval, will be enough for them.
You know, whether it's a kid growing up in the ghetto that joins a gang, or in this case, Sonia falling Not in love, but getting that masculine father figure from a career criminal.
This is something that all of us experience.
And there's one particular scene that really just nailed home the vulnerability of being a small boy.
This was an excellent scene to include in the movie.
And it's where Toljan takes him to the bathhouse, like the old Roman style.
This is Soviet Russia, and I guess they didn't have a lot of internal plumbing at the time.
So this was something where all the men would go to have their weekly shower.
So Sonia's there, and there's all these nude men all about, all like of all ages, fat, you know, muscular, etc.
But they're all men.
And his young boy's frame really stands in stark contrast to all of that.
And any of you, maybe like if you remember seeing your father naked when you were a little kid and how intimidating that sheer masculinity was, it's very present in this scene where Sonia looks around and then grabs some of the rushes that they use for scrubbing and he covers his groin with it.
At which point Toljan says to him, you know, oh, don't worry about it.
You're a man too.
And he wants to be a man.
He wants to achieve that masculinity, but he's very afraid of it at the same time.
You know, this boy that grew up without a father is very afraid of masculinity, afraid of the potential violence that is innate to the male form.
And that brief scene just perfectly captures that in my eyes.
The shyness, the nervousness, the fear that he feels without a real father, although at that point Toljan is starting to become a father to him.
And finally there's that fear that we all have to overcome.
And this really becoming a man is overcoming fear.
And early in the scene, early in the movie, he starts hitting Toljan because Toljan was hitting his mother.
He starts screaming at him and hitting him.
And Toljan hands him a knife and says, if you're going to do it, do it right.
Here, stab me.
And he drops the knife.
Toljan picks it up again and says, here, stab me right here.
And this time when he drops it, he wets himself and then runs and hides in the washroom to try and take his soiled pants off.
And then towards the end of the movie, when he eventually kills Tolshin, it's while Tolshin is taking a piss by the side of the railroad that he's about to...
This guy that used to dress as a soldier to ride the railroad is now dressed like a hobo and he's riding illegally on the cattle car.
So there's this theme of overcoming that fear, of challenging yourself.
And this is going to be as simple as the fear of approaching women as a young man.
Quite frankly, guys that are 14, 16, 18 even, can be absolutely terrified of girls.
It's shocking how universal this fear of being socially rejected is.
But that's ultimately how you become a man, is you overcome the fear, the fear of social rejection, the fear of masculinity, the fear that prevented you from complaining about your problems when you were young.
You take ownership of your life.
You no longer care what anybody else thinks about you.
And it's a very cold, bleak place to be, which is what we see at the end of the movie with the nothing, nothing, nothing.
That being a man is about being granite, about being self-possessed, and about containing that capacity for violence.
Next we have Katya.
Now, it's interesting.
I always like to read the IMDb reviews after I watch a film.
And most people interpret her as a victim.
And certainly in many ways she was.
I mean, here she is, she's a single mother, her husband is dead, she's trying to raise this son, and she gets into an abusive relationship with Toljan, who's a career criminal and basically uses her and her son.
Despite the brief moments of tenderness, he's using them the entire way through.
And then she winds up dying when she has his abortion for him.
It's a tragic tale.
And yet, in certain ways, Katya was setting herself up for the story from the very beginning.
Let's talk about the conception of Sonia in the first place.
She had sex with a soldier during World War II.
And I think we all know what the survival rates, especially for the Russians, were in that war.
They were absolutely terrible.
You know, in my family, I had a couple of great aunts, both of whom they wound up becoming old maids because they had lovers who died overseas.
Now, neither of them had children with these lovers.
It was a more traditional era.
But that's the point.
Katya didn't wait.
She wanted to live in the fantasy world where her husband would be coming home.
And so they had sex.
They conceived a child while the war was still ongoing, which eventually resulted in her being a single mother.
Rather than being realistic and rather than owning herself and owning her own choices, she was living in a fantasy.
She was trusting the universe to sort everything out for her, to make sure that her husband came back, that she wouldn't be adrift with no opportunity, no close family.
Furthermore, the fact that she risked conceiving a child with a man when she didn't have any immediate family to really take care of her, the fact that she is left on her own and that Sonia eventually goes to an orphanage, again, this shows this lack of preparation, this lack of self-ownership, this wanting the universe to sort itself out for you.
Right from the beginning, we can see her making herself into a victim.
The whole time, she is making herself prey, and yet she's also preying upon other people.
You know, that's the darker aspect to single mothers, after all.
That they rely upon the kindness of strangers, the charity.
They even presume upon it.
And while she, again, she was a widow, but there's no social safety net whatsoever.
You know, Russia had just been devastated and communism wasn't helping anything.
So she was expecting, she was entitled.
And so is it any wonder that she winds up getting together with a career criminal like that?
She wants to use others.
And so she herself winds up being used.
And at the very end, we see the terrible price for all of this.
There are certain scenes in the movie where Tolchin slaps her around, where she screams at him, you're a horrible man, you're horrible for my son.
I don't want you around.
And I guess the feminist interpretation of this is that he's controlling her through violence.
Except, how is he?
He's pretending to be a soldier, and she is going out of her way to help cover for him.
All she needs to do is go to the MPs, and he'll be arrested on the spot.
When she's screaming at him that I hate you, I'm going to leave you, I want you out of my life, she doesn't mean it.
She's just saying those things to rationalize staying with him.
She wants to stay with him because as long as she does, she doesn't have to make decisions for herself.
She doesn't have to take responsibility for herself.
As long as he keeps stealing, her and Sonia will be fed.
You know, she doesn't have to get a job.
She doesn't have to do anything difficult.
She just has to get slapped around every once in a while.
And in exchange, she yells at him.
She's the one putting herself in this scenario.
And ultimately, and this really speaks to the whole nature of evil, of pursuing such a dark route.
She dies after Toljin's been taken to prison, desperately wailing and crying as he's sent up to Siberia.
And then she has an abortion for him.
The mistake she made with Sonia's father was a mistake, but it was a mistake made out of love, and it created a child.
With Tolzhin, her mistake was one of selfishness, and it resulted in a dead baby and her own death by sepsis.
This is what the Bible means when it says that the wages of sin are death.
That if you don't pay attention, if you don't own your own life, you are headed down the path of destruction.
And finally, let's consider Tolchin.
Toljan, who dresses like a soldier, who claims his father is Stalin, and who says he really was a soldier.
Well, was he?
At first, we're left wondering about this whole topic, because you could certainly see somebody that was, you know, who knows what they saw on the Eastern Front.
You know, maybe they had to resort to cannibalism.
The horrors that the Russians in particular had to go through in that war, maybe it was too much to bear.
Maybe he cracked.
Maybe he was still, maybe he was a soldier and the whole thing just stripped so much humanity away from him that it's all he has left is violence, is thievery.
He doesn't know how to really trust other people or really form bonds with other people.
I don't think this was the case at all.
This is the impression he gives.
You know, this is the story you want to believe.
Especially when he does something kind.
Even when he was holding that knife, when he's giving that knife to Sonia and saying, stab me.
And then after Sonia pisses himself, he comes up and says, don't worry, everybody's pissed themselves.
Everybody's done that.
You don't have anything to be ashamed of.
You want to believe it.
You want to think that he's actually a good guy.
That maybe just something terrible happened to him and it turned him into this thief because he doesn't know what else to do with himself now.
You want to believe all of that.
Which is exactly the mistake that Katya made.
Toljan is a psychopath.
And you can see this by just how destructive everything is around him.
For instance, the giving giving Sonia the knife.
Now, even though he was only an eight-year-old boy, it was a sharp knife, and he didn't have a shirt on, he didn't have anything.
He could have died from a knife wound.
He wasn't doing this because he was self-sacrificing, but because psychopaths only understand how to relate to others through violence.
The TV series Hannibal is an excellent examination of a psychopath.
And again, for the record, most psychopaths are not actually violent.
They just don't have any reason not to be violent.
They're constantly manipulative and they only understand intimacy through manipulation.
So all of the intimate moments that happen between Sonia and Tolshan are related to violence in some manner.
Sonya is getting beat up by the local kids.
So Tolshan goes and just absolutely ruins the dad that Sonya throws some rocks at another kid or something like that.
So the dad shows up.
Toljan just destroys him and then forces Sonia to be violent to one of the other kids, to keep hitting him.
The knife scene.
Again, this is a man that only understands violence, that only understands the zero-sum game.
He doesn't know why he shouldn't steal from anybody else, because why wouldn't you?
The same with the scenes later on, where he's using him as a prop to steal.
He only understands intimacy through violence.
He doesn't understand anything but that.
And he's a lot like Dr. Lecter in that manner.
And finally, to further support this, let's ask ourselves, does anything that Toljan did, does that really serve his ends?
So he meets Katya and he meets Sonia on the train.
At the very beginning, they're sharing a booth together.
What does he immediately do?
He immediately seduces this woman who's already had a child.
Now here, he's this good-looking, charismatic guy that could really get into, he could do anything with himself.
He's intelligent, cunning, he's tough, good-looking, charming.
And what does he do?
He fake marries a single mother and then spends his life stealing silverware from the lower middle class.
He keeps doing this until he gets caught.
He keeps doing the exact same scam, pretending to be an army captain.
And that's what eventually gets him caught for pretending to be an officer.
He spends 10 years in Siberia, and at the end of the movie, he's still running the same scam, but now it's pathetic.
Instead of dressing like an officer and a gentleman, now he's dressing like a hobo.
And the money he's scamming is a quarter of what it once was.
And it winds up being Sonia that kills him in the end.
This evil bastard didn't know what he was doing with himself.
He was just manipulating constantly.
And so he gets the single mother.
And he gets her son.
And oh, that's a useful cover.
And then they catch him when he's about to run off by himself.
And he just, okay, I'll manipulate them some more.
I'll keep them around.
He occasionally does try and reach out in this pathetic way that psychopaths do by hitting his wife.
When she's yelling at him, when Katya's yelling at him and he's hitting her, that's the only way he knows how to be intimate.
And Katya, for her part, because she refuses responsibility, that's the only sort of intimacy she can have.
But for both of them, it winds up in death.
And finally, the only person to escape from this is Sonia, even though he doesn't realize it.
That he learned all the right lessons.
And it's a very cold, bracing wind of truth that he got.
But ultimately, he became his own man.
He transcended both of them.
He was still in a bad situation, but now he was in a bad situation where he could finally take authorship on things.
So in the third part, I'm going to be covering the Dark Triad and the scam artist.
▲
Export Selection