Temporarily withheld from release on its native soil-ostensibly because of the obscene harangue a woman delivers in its final episode-the latest work by Kira Muratova surfaced at Berlin, where it walked off with the Silver Bear. Heralded as an unsparing look at life in the USSR, it proves to be that and a great deal more. The first 40 minutes are a film-within-a-film about Natasha, a newly bereaved widow (Olga Antonova, in an extraordinary performance whose raw power will remind Western viewers of Gena Rowlands). The rest of the film follows its principal character, the ever-somnolent Nicolai (Sergei Popov, the screenplay's co-author) through a teeming profusion of types and characters-an alternately hilarious, touching, and appalling mosaic of Soviet society. The title refers to a condition of "weakness," which can take the form of either aggressiveness or passivity. A similar contrast (and the film's aesthetic strategy) is evoked by the film's key image, a snakeskin "where one unimaginably lovely color lies next to an unbelievably ugly one." Muratova, whose long-banned Short Meetings and Brief Farewells stunned Western viewers when they were finally "unshelved" in 1987, is one of the most impressive filmmakers on the world scene right now. And it's clear her goal is not simply to depict her troubled countrymen, but to hold a pitiless mirror up to all of humanity. --Peter Scarlet