Tale of lost time – Culture – Kommersant

The world premiere of Alexander Sokurov’s film “Fairy Tale” took place in Locarno. One of the most unexpected and unusual festival experiences in my life I received Andrey Plakhov.

Sokurov’s cinematography was taking shape before my eyes: at that time I managed to watch a “secret” copy of the film “The Lonely Voice of a Man” at VGIK, and then the arrested material of “Sorrowful Insensibility” at Lenfilm. Even then, the director’s interest in world history (he is a historian by first education), as well as in the history of cinema and the possibilities of artistic rethinking of newsreel, was clear.

And then perestroika began, I became chairman of the Conflict Commission, and Sokurov’s films were among the first to be picked up from the censorship “shelf”. As a result of the opportunity to work in a free atmosphere, dozens of films by the director appeared, which became favorites of international festivals and enriched world film classics. The pinnacle of that period was the “trilogy of tyrants” – about Hitler, Lenin and the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Then the trilogy turned into a tetralogy: Sokurov’s Faust provided a philosophical basis for the tyranny of the 20th century.

“Fairy Tale” has a lot in common with these films, and you often remember them while watching. You also remember the engravings of Dore and Piranesi, which served as a source of inspiration for the picturesque solutions of the frame. At the same time, it is obvious that Sokurov has entered a completely different stage – started by the “La Francophonie” and in many respects looped through his early documentary experiments. At that time, he made the film “The Allies” (“And nothing else”), where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were in the center; Hitler acted in the subordinate role of the vanquished. In the new picture (with the addition of Mussolini) the same characters, only Roosevelt is missing; it is no longer needed, since Churchill does an excellent job of personifying the cunning “democratic West” – by no means sinless, but, it seems, the only alternative to despotism.

The theme of “And Nothing Else” was the fragile peace reclaimed by the victors of the Second World War. The new picture is about the postponed war and the inevitable retribution, at least in the next world.

If “Allies” was bold in concept, but in terms of form a traditional documentary, “Fairy Tale” is a phantasmagoric spectacle: it does not look like anything and does not fit into any canons.

The action takes place in the afterlife, in Dante’s Purgatory, where key figures of not so long-standing European history are toiling. They carry on conversations among themselves – as Sokurov insists, put into their mouths from actually documented meetings. Not only about communism, atheism, imperial ambitions and the fact that “the grass must be mowed to the root” (Stalin). But also about joint drinking (Churchill), about wives (Hitler complains that he did not marry Wagner’s niece); about daughters (Churchill is surprised why they are born red-haired among the rulers). Mussolini recalls how he studied in the same Austrian library as Lenin. Hitler laments: why didn’t he burn London, why didn’t he burn Paris? He asks Stalin: “Why didn’t we divide the world in time?” Stalin replies: “I need the whole world, not half.”

Everyone speaks their own language – German, English, Italian, Stalin – Georgian. Actors only voice lines and synchronize lip movements, but on the screen there are not actors at all, but real characters, these arbiters of human destinies, captured for eternity by newsreels, but mounted in a completely different background and context. And fabulous miracles take place, presented, according to the director himself, “with light humor and heavy sarcasm.” Stalin is turning in his grave; Hitler calls him a “Caucasian Jew”, Churchill constantly calls the queen, making the rest of the leaders jealous with his antediluvian mobile phone.

And even a phrase addressed to one of the characters will sound: “Do not listen to Sokurov, go ahead!”. “Forward” is the key word of all dictatorships, addressed to the drugged masses.

The climax of the film is a stretched out, deformed chronicle: the ecstasy of idolatry leads the human mass into the crucible of murderous wars. The accompaniment to this cacophony is the “Song of the Decembrists” with the refrain “Forward, friends, forward, forward, forward” – in the context of the “Fairy Tale” radically changing its meaning.

Sokurov allows himself more than ever a lot of madness – not only tragic, but also hilarious; for example, cut out from different pieces of the chronicle, the characters double and triple: two Stalins bicker with three Hitlers at once.

In the film, in addition to the main characters, the restless Napoleon will toil and hang out in the backyards of the underworld; even Jesus Christ will appear. The gates of paradise for the dictators of the 20th century will be tightly closed, and each with sweet nostalgia will begin to remember his “finest hour”: the leaders on the stands-mausoleums and the jubilant peoples. “Women love war, soldiers love flowers” ​​(Hitler). “Everything will be forgotten and start over.” It is not so important which of the anti-heroes said this, but Sokurov clearly agrees with him.