Avoid sitting in the side sections of the Kenmore Theatre: at the Wednesday night showing of "Stone Flower" a cloud of local sadists, timing it cunningly, swarmed is a few moments after the picture began, and pounded up and down the aisles, obscuring the English titles with great effectiveness. Anyone who makes the trip to the Kenmore and is careful to get seated in the middle section, will find himself absorbed in an enchanting and colorful Russian fairy tale.

This is gratifying, since the name, "Artkino" prefixed to a picture too often has portended a succession of monolithic protagonists, striking heroic stances and delivering themselves of Messages. "The Stone Flower," though, is a straight-out, uncomplicated fantasy about a young artisan who, comprehending that stone has a soul, seeks to create in this medium a flower more alive than the ephemeral real thing. The plot traces his wanderings in a fairy kingdom, and the effects of his dream on his everyday life. The wildly beautiful technicolor ("filmed," the program confides, "by a secret process") breathes a sort of glory into the most mundane developments in the story.

The picture is, however, not altogether a thing of sheer wonder. The "hero," for instance, in his attempt to portray a starstruck artisan, wears a stunned, ox-like expression, and looks at all times like a ballet dancer converted for the occasion. In fact, his wooden absorption with creating the stone flower to the neglect of his unkissed bride and an amorous fairy queen, will for a while make you wonder about him. And Hollywoodisms creep in: the background music continually dictates what mood you must get in for upcoming scenes. And the seeking mind can read Significance into several episodes: someone scored a dialectical coup in presenting a smirking, opulent nobleman who rewards the hero, who has won for him a 500 thousand ruble bet, by giving him a ruble.

But the picture is above all an artless fable, done in a color which is deep in the meaning of the scene-- no easy feat--and not something daubed on as a bemused after thought. The Russian cinema here has joined the English and French in challenging Hollywood's fatcat producers simply by making a picture with imagination and directness.