The Singers: A Profound Adaptation of Ivan Turgenev

Sam A. Davis’s The Singers is an 18-minute ensemble musical drama with big names to people it. But there is little in general to not appreciate about the film, adapted from Ivan Turgenev’s short story of the same name. Set in an old pub in the middle of pitch-black nowhere, a motley crowd of patrons nurse their drinks and their wounds, some not having spoken for what feels like years, some talking for the sake of keeping things moving.

There is no one to hate here. No animosities that escalate into brawls whose sole aim is to vent. In fact, that goes out the door right at the beginning. Morbid humour remains, though, like the camera lingering on a plastic fish playing “Take Me to the River”, or the many sniggering potshots a tone-deaf patron takes at one and all.

It begins with Will Harrington’s entrance. The Gabbler, the menace, a positive force whose frictive nature clashes with the ordering presence of Mike Yung as the bartender. An impromptu contest is announced. Whoever sings best wins 100 USD and a beer. And so, in fits and starts, a bit of mean cajoling here and there, a true and proper song from Chris Smither, the Wild Master, breaks the lull of numbness. Elsewhere, in secret in a bathroom quite different in colour and lighting, Judah Kelly’s Yakov sings alone, afraid of being heard.

The sound design enmeshes a sense of expanding hope within dread, the two co-existing and nearly bleeding into one another precisely because hope is so delicate and born within and despite the all-pervasive shadow of misery. The plot undergirds this with its pairing of the transformative role of music with the small material perks of money and alcohol. What begins as a tentative scheme becomes a branch with which the characters connect as much with each other as with their own alienated selves.

The browns and goldens that colour the frame inside the pub are initially the accumulation of age—yellowed with age, mottled with age—everything that began with bright white and suffered time. But the duration of the film, its reanimating power, transforms that image of inevitable death into the halcyon hues of profound warmth and community.

Cinematography for the pub, both tender and grand in lighting and framing, lends to these bedraggled characters a humanity whose optimism can rival any fresh faced Disney character. It moves you with the depth it remembers to carry forth from its source. In the tight closeups, you see the beauty of faces who would not win a second glance—or even a first—from a distance. They let you see life seeping into the characters once more and come aglow.

Each performance commands the flow of time. Kelly plays his reserved character with a fragile vulnerability. Smither is the centre of gravity with the sheer depth of history he seems to emanate. Yung steals the show in an impromptu and deeply felt participation. Matt Corcoran provides the finishing touch, a rendition of “Vesti la giubba”.

The Singers adapts its source text for a different time and culture, but retains the temporary invention of profundity amid despondency. Its image as poignant as its sound, the film invests its characters with the dignity that has been lost over the years. It proves more essential than ever.

Watch The Singers Short Film Trailer