Konchalovsky’s Sin

It isn't easy being “divine.” Pope Julius II’s praise certainly hasn’t made Michelangelo Buonarroti rich. Even more troubling, Michelangelo’s soul is even more tormented than ever, despite his loyal service to his patron and the Church. The legendary Renaissance artist will also have to navigate worldly politics in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Italian-language Russian-Italian co-production Sin, which opens virtually tomorrow.

Michelangelo just finished the Sistine Chapel, to Papal acclaim. Technically, he had to be pulled away kicking and screaming. Frankly, Julius II cut Michelangelo a lot of slack, which he appreciates, so naturally, he accepts the commission to sculpt the Pope’s grand projected tomb. However, those plans come into question when the Della Rovere Pope is succeeded by Leo X, of the rival de Medici clan.

Long associated with the Della Rovere family, Michelangelo now finds himself caught in the middle of a bitter power struggle. Unfortunately, both sides know how to push his buttons, by appealing to his artistic vanity. In fact, Konchalovsky’s Michelangelo is a bit of an Orson Welles figure. He is keenly aware of his own genius, yet the artist is hard pressed to actually finish his commissions.

Sin is an immersive film that vividly recreates the grandeur and the grubbiness of Renaissance Rome and Florence. It definitely feels like an attempt to revisit the glory of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, which Konchalovsky co-wrote. However, it lacks the surreal bite of the 1966 masterpiece.

Unlike the brawny Charlton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy, Alberto Testone’s Michelangelo really looks like he spent several years flat on his back, inhaling paint fumes. He is not quite frail, but he is definitely weathered and a bit unsteady. Arguably, his performance does more to humanize Michelangelo in a physical way rather than in psychological or emotional terms.

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades!

By definition, there can't be a strike in the socialist workers’ paradise, so there must have been something deeply amiss in the provincial industrial town of Novocherkassk. Of course, the Soviet authorities dealt with dissent the way Communists always have. The result was a massacre and a cover-up. Andrei Konchalovsky dramatizes this formerly redacted episode of Soviet history in the searing Dear Comrades!, which releases virtually tomorrow, in conjunction with Film Forum.

Loyal Party apparatchik Lyuda Syomina keeps assuring townspeople they have never had it so good, even though the Party just increased food prices and slashed wages at the local munitions factory. Despite the local Party’s propaganda campaign, the factory workers have had enough. Awkwardly for her, this includes her modestly rebellious daughter, Svetka. The mere notion of a strike is enormously embarrassing, but when the striking workers barricade the Novocherkassk committee headquarters, Khrushchev dispatches the military, under the command of a trigger-happy loyalist.

Even though Syomina and her colleagues manage to sneak out, the shooting inevitably starts and it continues until the strikers are utterly broken. The unofficial death toll is high, but officially, the incident never happened, leaving worried parents no recourse when they realize their children are missing. That also includes the panicked Syomina, but at least her Party status gives her some limited latitude to search for Svetka, or her body. She finds a surprising ally in Loginov, a cautiously disillusioned KGB agent.

You probably never heard of the Novocherkassk Massacre, because the Party tried to whitewash it from history. Yet, it most certainly did happen. To ensure accuracy, Konchalovsky enlisted Yuri Bagrayev, the chief military prosecutor in charge of the frustrated 1992 inquiry, as a technical advisor. Years after the regime’s fall, this film still feels radioactive. Initially, the tone is somewhat akin to the absurdism, particularly with respect to the petty bureaucratic rivalries, but it soon turns deadly serious. Frankly, Konchalevsky’s depiction of massacre maelstrom is frighteningly realistic and the subsequent crack-down and cover-up are absolutely chilling to witness. Absurdity, confusion, and brutality—that pretty much covers the Soviet Socialist experience.

Regardless, you cannot look away as this tragedy unfolds. Without question, Dear Comrades is Konchalovsky’s late-career masterpiece. There is so much to parse and analyze in the film, but it is always gripping on an immediate, human level. Julia Vysotskaya’s portrayal of the conspicuously flawed Syomina is wonderfully complex and messily human. (In many ways, her compromises represent all the compromises the Soviet people had to make, in order to live under an immoral system.) Vladislav Komarov provides an effectively understated counterbalance to her, as the slightly out-of-step Loginov.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev

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 100^th 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.

Konchalovsky’s Paradise

The word “paradise” usually has nothing but positive associations, but to reach a Heavenly paradise, you necessarily need to die first, whereas instituting a utopian paradise on earth invariably involves mass murder and oppression. The connection between death and idyllic perfection comes through loud and clear in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Jules is a comfortable but far from compassionate middle-class French police officer collaborating with Vichy and the National Socialists. Helmut is a young German nobleman who takes pride in his status, even though it is a source of insecurity among his working-class SS colleagues. Both men will use their positions to sexually exploit Olga, an elegant Russian émigré arrested for sheltering Jewish children. Each will discuss their wartime experiences from a position of definitive hindsight. That means they are dead, as becomes evident when the resistance assassinates Jules during the first act. However, you cannot say they share the same ultimate fates.

In each case, the imprisoned Olga welcomed her jailer’s attention, as a means of survival. The outlook for her is especially desperate when she reaches the concentration camp Helmut is inspecting. Konchalovsky rather sparingly depicts the horrors of death camp life, but he periodically slaps us with a brutally intense episode of cruelty. Therefore, we can plainly understand why it is almost a godsend when Olga reunites with Helmut, a former summer fling, who became ridiculously enraptured with her. In the intervening years, Helmut drunk deeply of National Socialism, becoming a hardcore ideologue and anti-Semite. Yet, he himself readily admits, had he been born in Russia, he would have been a Communist. Indeed, he quite respects their fanaticism and statism, but those are not the terms he would use.

Konchalovsky’s strategy to combine Nuremberg-esque interview segments with dramatic sequences will be divisive, but it all pays off in the final scene. Even viewers who do not fully buy into Konchalovsky’s style and structure will concede the power of Aleksandr Simonov’s frighteningly beautiful black-and-white cinematography. Like Son of Saul, Paradise is shot in the box-like Academy ration, but every frame is still visually arresting.

Julia Vysotskaya (Konchalovsky’s accomplished wife) is also ferociously heartbreaking as Olga. It is an unflinching, morally complex portrayal of suffering and survival, but Konchalovsky only invites us to empathize, not to judge. Philippe Duquesne is fine as Jules, but he never stretches our conception of the corrupt French copper. In contrast, Christian Clauß is a chilling true believer, but he also develops disturbingly dysfunctional yet problematically human chemistry with Vysotskaya’s Olga.

Frankly, it is a minor miracle Russia selected Paradise as its official foreign language Oscar submission last year (it was shortlisted, but not nominated). Konchalovsky does not belabor the point, but he unambiguously suggests parallels between German National Socialism and Soviet Communism. After all, his second film was withdrawn from circulation by the Soviets and he has since become a reluctant critic of Putin (unlike his filmmaker brother Nikita Mikhalkov). That deeply rooted skepticism of isms, prejudices, and authoritarian leaders is reflected throughout Paradise. It is a film of great artistry and moral clarity. Highly recommended, Paradise opens this Friday (10/6) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.