Dreams of Fugue, Flight, and Escape: A Single Moment of Fantasy in ‘Welcome, No Trespassing’

 

Whether mechanical or magical, spaceship or superhuman, scenes of flight are sometimes some of my favourite dreamy sequences in fiction and film. There’s the wonderful broomstick scene at the end of de Sica’s “Miracolo a Milano,” Guido floating away above the water in Fellini’s “8 ½,” even “Mary Poppins,” “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” and a more random favourite of mine, the medium-format version of “Three Plus Two,” where a humble all-seeing piece of fruit floats and bobs above holidaymaking families on the beach (a wonderful surreal moment in an otherwise documentary-style introduction). And for some reason my mind very often takes me back to this scene at the very end of “Welcome, or No Trespassing” (1964). By this point in the film, our wayward but well-meaning boy hero Kostya Inochkin is vindicated and returned back into the fold of his fellow pioneer scouts, and they all celebrate by rushing to the open water (together with their parents, who have come to see them at the camp). A jubilant Kostya leaps off the banks and soars into the sky, gazing down at the lake and everyone in it with curious wonder. And when he finally tumbles down on the other banks, he adorably calls over his grandmother, who takes a running jump, becomes weightless, and really rather elegantly flies over to her grandson.

It isn’t always well-done, but it is immensely rewarding when, in books as well as in film, we are presented with the rich inner eye of a small child experiencing the world (and its grown-ups) around them: Klimov does this with a light, humorous touch, particularly in mischievous Kostya’s flights of fancy, imagining how his grandmother would react when he’s thrown out of camp, or how he’d save the life of disapproving scoutmaster Dynin who would then be forever in his debt. But this scene is the only one where fantasy appears to rupture into reality: Chagall-like, a moment of ‘fugue’ from the weight of the world. In a film hemmed in from every direction, from the clean-swept paths and fences of the camp to the satirically sensible, if-only-everyone-would-listen pioneer rules, this exhilarating break is a lovely breath of fresh air Xo