Review of the film “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Lokshin

“The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Lokshin is being released – not so much an adaptation as a production based on Bulgakov’s novel. The book has earned a reputation for being practically impossible to adapt to the screen, and the new film, as is convinced Yulia Shagelman, it confirms.

“The Master and Margarita” is another long-term project of Russian cinema, released after “Air” by Alexei German Jr. The production of the film was also announced in 2018, when it received financial support from the Cinema Fund. The director was then listed as Nikolai Lebedev, known for “Legend No. 17” (2012) and “Crew” (2016), and the film was planned to be released in 2021. Since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridge, the project has changed producers (in particular, Konstantin Ernst dropped out of it), directors and screenwriters: Lebedev, who took up the historical drama “Nuremberg” (2023), was replaced by Mikhail Lokshin, who made his debut in the full-length costume melodrama “Silver Skates,” and he wrote the new script together with Roman Kantor, who also worked on that film. There were rumors about inviting one or another foreign star – for example, the producers toyed with the idea of ​​offering the role of Woland to Gary Oldman, but in the end it was played by the German actor August Diehl, whose articulation in close-ups does not always coincide with the voice acting, which, like The awkwardly digital Maine Coon Hippo looks a little strange in a film with a budget of 1.2 billion rubles.

Filming was postponed for various reasons and, as a result, continued from July to November 2021, although many of the events of the film seem literally torn from the latest news feed, as if confirming Bulgakov’s thesis that the “population” as a whole does not change much, even under the influence of the housing issue .

Like their not-so-successful predecessors – Yuri Kara in the 1994 film and Vladimir Bortko in the 2005 TV series – the authors focused more on the Moscow ups and downs with the participation of a mysterious foreigner than on what was happening in Yershalaim. However, the current title, which coincides with the book title, “The Master and Margarita,” still suits the film better than “Woland,” which flashed at some of the working stages: they are the main characters here, and not a foreign “consultant” with a retinue that is almost did not get screen time, and certainly not the procurator of Judea Pontius Pilate and the defendant Yeshua Ha-Nozri.

The last two appear on the screen first as characters in a future play based on the play of a nameless Writer, whom no one has yet called Master (Evgeniy Tsyganov). Just yesterday it was published in a thick magazine and allowed to be staged, but today rehearsals are canceled at the request of censors, the magazine’s circulation is withdrawn from sale, and the author himself is driven through a humiliating meeting of MASSOLIT, which examines his numerous ideological sins, and expelled from this organization. Friends and colleagues look away when they meet, professional prospects disappear overnight. Confused and depressed by all this, the Writer accidentally meets Margarita (Yulia Snigir) – no, not on the boulevard, but on the side of the May Day parade – and she becomes the muse for a novel in which events, people and even cats from his life are melted through the prism his imagination.

The universe of the picture is double: here and, as it were, the real Moscow of the 1930s, dug up by eternal construction, in which the action takes place for the most part in monumental, Stalinist-empire buildings, playing the “roles” of a theater, a restaurant, a joint institution where writers meet; and the alternative Moscow from the novel, in which the general plan of 1935 was embodied, with the colossal Palace of the Soviets on the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, airships soaring in the sky and tram tracks on the tiles of the Patriarchs. There is a third, completely phantasmagoric dimension: in it, a communal apartment on Bolshaya Sadovaya opens up into the otherworldly palace of the devil, and the Master himself, the poet Ivan Bezdomny (Danil Steklov) and – suddenly – Styopa Likhodeev (Marat Basharov) find themselves prisoners of a psychiatric hospital in a very gothic way. constructivist type.

Somewhere on the margins of history, the “real” Pilate (Klas Bang) and Yeshua (Aaron Vodovoz) come to life. However, the entire gospel line is reduced to two or three decorative episodes, included as if for show. And along with it, the picture is deprived of the philosophical and existential meanings of the original source, turning into a chronicle of a completely material and very recognizable world, where people love money, inform on each other, hesitate in accordance with the instructions of higher authorities, go to almost naked parties and just in case apologize before and after. It was all filmed, no doubt, colorfully, elegantly and on a grand scale. As they say in the film itself, a lot of work has been done.