Reader recommendation by Giles Edwards
DIRECTED BY: Aleksey German
FEATURING: Yuriy Tsuliro, Nina Ruslanova, Mickhail Dementyev
PLOT: General Klensky, the head of a prestigious Moscow mental hospital in 1950s Soviet Russia, tries to evade KGB agents before he’s captured and forced to help the authorities in their last ditch effort to save a dying Josef Stalin.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: With each cluttered frame stuffed with inky blacks and smoky whites, the nightmarish reality of Stalin’s last “Terror” makes for uneasy viewing as a nightmarish hellscape seeps ever more into the cruelty of the tragically mundane. This reality is made both more real and more unpleasant by the inclusion of the dissonant sound track.
COMMENTS: It took nearly a decade for Aleksey German to put together this ordeal of a movie about the last of Stalin’s great purges just before the demise of the Soviet Union’s ruthless dictator. The nightmare of pursuit lasts three days for the heavy-handed but sympathetic General Kensky, who rules like a benevolent counterpart to “Uncle Joe,” presiding over his medical facility in a cognac-fueled display of ordered madness. Surrounded by the grotesque (be it in the chaos of his hospital or the sinister order provided by the black-sedan riding apparatchiks), Kensky uncovers a plot to stage his fall from grace before fleeing to the home of a sympathetic former nurse. Disappearing at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen and being spirited away in the back of a “Soviet Champagne” truck, he meets with the bed-ridden, stroke-afflicted leader before his own disappearance is arranged for good.
The entire atmosphere of the film is made of deeply black blacks and sodium-light bright whites. Steam and disorder fill the interiors, while outside the tainted white of snow and dark sheen of the KGB’s cars make for an incongruous combination of the harshest of whites and darkest of blacks. Innocents are randomly round up (one unfortunate, in the wrong place and the wrong time, is unceremoniously dumped into the trunk of one of the ever-present black cars), and a fearful citizenry makes itself complicit with the state sponsored terror, hoping their compliance will direct the authorities’ suspicion and ire elsewhere.
What makes this movie weird is how it manages to capture society at its most grotesque. There are other movies that have individual images that are more troubling, but this film’s continuous streak of casual violence, cruel misfortune, and unsettling monotony of sadism in a fearful society grinds on for well over two hours of hyper-realism.
The soundtrack consists of oblique conversations continually interspersed with the sound of spitting, sneezing, blowing noses, grunts and all manner of human-noise unpleasantness. While no doubt this is realistic, the constant reminder of people’s bodily sounds makes the soundtrack seem more of a heightened reality: we see (and, more so, hear) humanity in all its discourteous glory.
German was a contemporary of Andrei Tarkovsky (of Andrei Rublev and Stalker fame). But whereas Tarkovsky saw the grittiness of reality and transformed it into a primordial poetry that bordered on spiritual, German takes the opposite route and ground his films so thoroughly in the depths of the hellishly mundane, it is almost as if one is seeing and hearing Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”, but without the “Delight” (or even, for that matter, the “Garden”).
This movie was finished just before the Putin era began: made between the early and late ’90s, along with a number of other introspective post-Soviet Films. One becomes weary in the soul watching the hell this doctor and patriarch goes through in the name of the grisly interpretation of Soviet idealism that was Joseph Stalin’s Russia. The ostensibly uplifting movement of Soviet Realism in film is given a punch to the gut in this vision of nightmare turned into real-life.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Would fans of Bela Tarr vibe to this arty death-fest? o:
I can try to find out – any particular Tarr titles in mind? (I must unfortunately admit my ignorance of the filmmaker.) I’d be happy to watch what I can and return with an educated opinion for you.
I mean, Satantango(8 hours long) is pretty representative of his overall death-trodden vibe.
Ohhhh boy. Well, I just added “All Disks” to my Netflix queue. Once I watch the thing I’ve got here, I’ll begin my trip into Mr Tarr’s grim universe and report back.
I wish you very many pleasures retained from your 8-hour trip through gorgeous Eastern European misery-porn captured on celluloid.
Here’s hoping – I just found out that, for reasons unfathomable, Netflix seems to have on hand only the 1st and 4th disc of the set (the first third of the movie and the extras, respectively). I’ll try and contact them, but I don’t know if I want to splash out 50$ for a used copy. I’ll keep you posted.
P.S.: There’s a rather hilarious 2-star review of the film on Amazon’s site that exhaustively covers a scene in the film, as if it were real life. It’s subject is “Animal Torture & Murder”.
Giles, nice review, but I think you missed one significant element – the absurdist humor; the tone of the above review is a perfect fit for German’s subsequent (and final) film, Hard To Be A God (death, starkness, and putrid viscosity). At least Khrustalyov, My Car! has some absurdly comic moments sprinkled throughout; Hard To Be A God affords you no such pleasures.
Although both are worthwhile candidates.
You are correct, Russ: I did not mention the undercurrent. It’s a somewhat deep undercurrent, and this was my first official foray into interpreting weird movies. (The final absurd bit of the film managed to be dark, comforting, and funny at the same time.)
I’ll suggest, though, that there is at least one moment in “Hard to Be a God” that elicited a laugh (of sorts) from me. You might almost call it the punchline.