Khrustalyov, mashinu! (1998) Reviews

• Brilliant excerpt of past

  jtuohini2000-05-25

  This black-and-white film is a total surprise: never earlier have I seen anyone making history to live as breathtaking as Aleksei German in his output; "Khrustalyov, mashinu!" brings us the year of Stalin's death such close to us. Ghost of Stalin and the power of fear and idiotism can almost touch us through this perfect film. "Khrustalyov" consists of scenes with prestissimo-tempo: persons are talking and walking and camera follows so many things that it is almost impossible to absorb all the material which is offered us humble spectators. The plot is not as important as how it is told. Superb views from Moscow in the middle of the Winter with cars driving like devilish monsters are without any doubt one my greatest moments in cinema. It took a whole year from Germany to collect all the vehicles - only to show them in his film for few minutes... What perfectionism! And the whole film is same miraculous quality. A must!

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• one of a kind

  savva_pelik2011-04-11

  an absolute masterpiece that becomes quite an experience for the audience. from the first sight, it might be interesting for those who were born in soviet regime only, since the story itself is about the darkest period of soviet regime - Stalin's era - but if you look closer you will discover a Kafka-like parable of a man trying to survive in a doomed circle of fatal circumstances. dark, atmospheric, accurate in every single character and detail, this film requires your involvement to be understood and appreciated - and once this happens, you will achieve a cinematic treasure, one of a kind. 10/10

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• Brilliant!

  josephmaurer2006-01-08

  One of the most brilliant films ever made, it is also one of the most challenging to watch. Alexii German's film about the Doctor's Plot of 1953, the Stalin-Beria machine, and anti-semitism is a brutal and farcical exploration that puts the viewer into states of disorientation, narrative panic - even induced paranoia - that captures the feel of late stalinism (where no one could follow the plot.) The mix of comedy and atmosphere of threat and brutality is not for the meek. It is a film of frenzied imagination that shifts registers (no one knows whats going on, thus no one person can relate the whole story) and genres (mystery, thriller, comedy, drama, historical, horror, melodrama.) It is never easy to follow, but also never random - all of the decisions work to leave clues to the plot while effortlessly conveying the tone of the period with each scene. Don't try for a complicated symbolic reading (when the "very semitic looking" twins dash in and out of closets at various points in the film they are playing out their own paranoid neurosis of having to hide in these closets when the authorities come, no symbols here.) The nonsense is very, very real. Be ready for a continual denial of certainty. Thankfully, it is beautifully shot to ease the challenge. Be sad (or sigh in relief, depending) that the original director's cut isn't available. Its even "moreso" in every way!! One of Russia's most daring and original filmmakers.

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• Stalin like you've never seen him before

  laursene2003-11-25

  It's easy to slot away Khrustalyov, mashinu! as either a great and beautiful whatchamacallit, or a hopeless hodgepodge. Actually, it is about something: the Stalinist terror, and the accumulated guilty consciences of the Russians - even many of his victims - after living for a generation under his thumb. General Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo, in a stunning performance) is a "good" Russian - a doctor who has achieved a position of power and respect under Stalin while, he thinks, maintaining his honor and humanity. That delicate balancing act comes undone when he finds out that he's on the hit list during the "doctors' plot," Stalin's final purge. German's film captures the growing absurdity of trying to rationalize life under a beast like Stalin: His principal characters' lives (and brains) have become as cluttered and confused with attempts to make sense of their own conduct in the face of tyranny as the crazy, stuffed-to-the-gills, attic-like warrens of rooms they live in. Russia at the end of Stalin is a squalid sprawl of these absurdist dwellings, with only the sinister black cars of the party apparats representing any kind of order, and that the most brutal kind. The violence creeps into everyone's lives, as we watch German's characters slap and spit at and sometimes sexually assault each other. Sometimes it's deadly, sometimes in jest, but always a kind of emanation of the violence visited on them from the terrible man who pulls all the strings. Millions of people lived under a system something like this in the 20th Century, and German's film is great because it captures so much of the absurdity and brutality they experienced. It shows you how they lived through it, and also how the subterfuges that helped them to do so could often turn around and bite them back - making their survival tactics ultimately useless against the terror. Life under Stalin was a desperate balancing act, represented here by the game of balancing a drink on one's head that one of the minor characters and then, at the end, Klensky himself engage in. With Khrustalyov, mashinu! it's hard to know where to hand the most praise: The art direction is staggering. All the performances are perfect. The direction is supple and endlessly perceptive. The B&W cinematography is gorgeous. There are signs of the influence of Orson Welles' films circa the 1960s, and especially of Welles' The Trial, with its characters moving through the cluttered warrens of rooms in the Gare St. Lazare. The way German choses to view his characters also reminds me of Bela Tarr's work. But German is a master and Khrustalyov, mashinu! is an astonishing artistic vision of a terrible time in human history.

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• merge of Fellini's 8 1/2 and Katchor's Julius Knipl

  camel-92002-05-03

  clearly, this is a film for which either one votes 10 or votes 3. Those artsy folks will hail it a great feat, and those folks that wish to be entertained will walk out of the theather. A black and white film, the titles appear only after about 10 minutes of pivoting plots, kind of reminded me how the titles suddenly appeared in Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time the West". The random appearence of people's faces from left and right, some emerging from sauna tubs, others from foggy and steamy rooms, reminds Fellini's Otto e Mezzo. And much of the interiors, people's musings on everyday life, and the "life goes on" quality of city life, reminds the graphic novel by Ben Katchor, "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer". On the absurbist twists and plots, "The Nose" by Gogol comes to mind, and the slight fantastic world (look out for those umbrellas suddenly popping open) brings Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita". Rich (but senseless) plot, lots of takes, lots of baroquely enriched interiors, outdoor scenes of streets in snowy winter and the muffled sound of cars rolling on snow. Even the title is random: a sentence one hears being yelled by one of the many many characters. Now, if Francesco Rosi's "La Tregua" had a bit of this randomness and absurbist quality to give more of the feel of directionless of war's end, it would have been great.

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