During his early career at the Ukrainian Alexander Dovzhenko Studio, Paradjanov invested the period's folksy scripts with his own magic. In Ukrainian Rhapsody he seems to have been influenced by the American musical; after the first ten minutes, you'll realize it's not Minnelli, but the music and the brilliant use of color linger on. The opening sequence is something of "A Ukrainian in Paris," with its postcard sets of gay Parizhky and music spilling into the streets. Then, in the Ukrainian countryside, with willows weeping and haystacks floating, and lines of peasant chorines, it might be Busby Berkeley kitsch as filtered through Jancso. But soon bombs explode and browns dominate the color field, and Ukrainian Rhapsody reveals the time-frame of its elliptical narrative, telling of a peasant girl who becomes an international singing star while her lover is lost and presumed dead in the war. It matters not that this film comes to us without English subtitles; its plot is so conventional, the English-speaking viewer soon forgets that the dialogue is in another language. Complex and fascinating are the Paradjanov tropes that turn a social-realist musical into a hallucinatory fantasy: his sets are rooms full of found objects, a surrealistic flea market (even German soldiers loll about in a Louis XV decorated box-car); bombed-out buildings and churches become an ancient landscape; flowers and apples are passed from character to character as symbols of life in the midst of a dream of death.