In
1960, the Soviet Union launched a campaign lionizing Russian icon painter
Andrei Rublev to encourage Russian pride during the post-Stalinist thaw. That
narrowly opened the window for a cinematic bio-pic. Andrei Tarkovsky would have
been the Party’s absolute last choice to make such a film, but somehow Mosfilm
put it into production anyway. They were not happy with the results, demanding
cuts and withholding Tarkosky’s epic from domestic distribution. However, the
rest of world immediately hailed the film as a masterwork. It is a powerful but
demanding film that anyone with a serious interest in cinema as a legit form of
art must wrestle with eventually. There is no time like the present, because
the digitally restored Andrei Rublev opens
today in New York.
Do
not expect a conventional biographical treatment. There are no scenes of the
precocious Rublev in short pants. We never even see him paint a single
bush-stroke. Instead, Tarkovsky and co-screenwriter Andrei Konchalovsky (the great
Russian director, who also helmed Tango
& Cash) skip over years and even decades, focusing on seven incidents
in his life, whose full significance and inter-connectedness will be revealed
in the final scenes.
When
we first meet Rublev, he is one of a trio of itinerant icon-painting monks.
Despite his relative youth, Rublev’s reputation proceeds him, much to the consternation
of his Iago-like colleague Kiril. When the master Theophanes the Greek requests
Rublev to be his chief assistant and de facto anointed successor, Kiril’s rage
prompts him to break with the Orthodox Church. Although fame and accolades are
Rublev’s for the taking, he becomes increasingly disillusioned by the
corruption of the Church and nobility, as well as the harsh and unjust
conditions endured by the peasantry.
Rublev
will also be traumatized by acts of barbarism that Tarkovsky stages in
graphically violent long takes, on an epic scale worthy of Cecil B. DeMille.
Over fifty years later, these sequences still have the power to shock, but it
is worth noting a notorious scene in which a cow is set on fire was cut from
all but the earliest edits (the cow was fine, by the way).
If
you want to get sucked into somebody else’s life and throw your empathetic arms
around them, Andrei Rublev will leave
you cold like the Siberian tundra. However, the boldness of Tarkovsky’s grotesquely
baroque vision is arresting, in an immersive kind of way. Even though they are ostensibly
science fiction films, it is not hard to see echoes of Tarkovsky’s Daumier-and-Bruegel-like
set pieces in Aleksey German’s Hard to Bea God and Andrzej Zuławski’s On the Silver Globe.
Frankly,
it is Tarkovsky’s bold strokes that drive the film rather than his cast’s elocution
and emoting. Still, Anatoly Solonitsyn performance as Rublev is genuinely
haunting—you could even call it iconic. Yet, it might just be Nikolai Burlyayev’s
manic, frantic portrayal of Boriska, a young aspiring bell-caster very likely
in over his head that could very well define the film’s sense of hope and desperation.
Andrei Rublev is an unpolitical
film, by just about every conceivable criterion, but it is easy to see why the
Soviets thought it was bad for Party business. There is no question Tarkovsky and
Konchalovsky vividly illustrate the dark side of orthodoxy—with a small “o.”
Yet, the Vatican was hip enough to include on their “Great Films” list,
compiled to mark the 100th anniversary of cinema (a pretty solid
honor roll that includes obvious masterpieces and some genuinely worthy
outliers). Frankly, it is the sort of film you are supposed to sink into and
get a little lost in, but when it bites back, it clamps down hard. Highly
recommended as one of the most important films ever, Andrei Rublev opens today (8/24) in New York, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
