by Allan Fish
(Russia 2013 177m) DVD1/2
Aka. Trudno byt bogom
Earth minus 800
p Viktor Izvekov, Leonid Yarmolnik d Aleksei German w Aleksei German, Svetlana Karmalita novel Arkadiy Strugatskiy, Boris Strugatskiy ph Yuriy Klimenko, Vladimir Ulin ed Irina Gorokhovskaya art Elena Zhukova, Georgi Kropachyov, Sergei Kokovkin
Leonid Yarmolnik (Don Rumata), Yevgeni Gerchakov (Budakh), Aleksandr Chutko (Don Reba), Valentin Golubenko (Arata), Yuri Tsurilo (Don Pampa), Oleg Botin (Bucher), Natalya Motova (Ari), Zura Kipzhidze (Zurab),
Remember that priceless moment in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, directly after the ‘Bring Out your Dead’ scene where Graham Chapman’s Arthur, King of the Britons, rides past accompanied by Terry Gilliam’s servant Patsy clumping coconut halves and John Cleese turns to cart driver Eric Idle and asked who that was, and Idle replies “must be a king. He hasn’t got shit all over him.” It’s hard not to think of Holy Grail when watching Aleksei German’s farewell statement. There’s no king here, everyone seems to have shit all over them, and proud they are, too.
The setting you would think would be medieval times, or even the Dark Ages, but the opening narration tells us it’s not quite as one may think. It’s not even Earth for starters but rather another planet, smaller but not dissimilar to Earth, discovered in the distant future, but running 800 years behind ours in what was, to us, the Renaissance. Here, however, in the backward kingdom of Arkanar, the Renaissance never happened, and Earth sends three dozen scientists and thinkers to the planet to try and kick-start the advancement of science so the planet could, in time, become a possible outpost for humankind as we know it. The scientists are told, however, not to directly alter events, it must be restricted to basic encouragement. But how to do this, when the country is living in a sort of vile police state run by and for morons, with their own version of the Hitler brownshirts courtesy of the ‘greys’, hooded idiot figures dressed in grey, as the name suggests, and wandering the desolate wintry landscape, armed with pitchforks and assorted basic weapons, tasked with tracking down all thinkers, smartarses, bookworms and artists with the order to drown them in latrines, literally in shit, to keep the people ignorant and confused. One such scientist Don Rumata has disguised himself as a local lord, rumoured to be the descendant of a God, and he tries to carry out his mission to search for and save a doctor.
It’s impossible to describe German’s film even to those familiar with the original novel, and while many critics have warmed to its inherent madness, many have dismissed it as a dying director’s folly and even as a disaster. It’s like a Near Death Experience version of Don Quixote in Dante’s Hell, the ultimate example of that greatest of generic oxymoron, the medieval sci-fi film. Visually it evokes a rich heritage, not only of his own work, but of Tarkovsky, Vlacil’s Marketa Lazarova, The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, Gilliam’s Time Bandits, Zulawski’s On the Silver Globe and the entire oeuvre of Béla Tarr, while the recreated city of hovels make Shakespeare’s Boar’s Head seem like the Raffles Hotel in comparison. Emetic and scatological detail is everywhere, its myriad of peasants rolling around in the filth like the epitome of pigs in shit, happily blowing their noses, vomiting and urinating on each other. And as if that wasn’t enough, there are moments when not only the fabric of time and space seem to distort – such as Don Rumata’s playing a primitive saxophone he made himself – but the fourth wall, so we get an idiot peasant turning to the camera muttering “get out of the way or I’ll hurt you.” By the end of this journey, and it’s certainly all about the journey, it’s like an alternate Marketa Lazarova where the wolves eat the entire cast, as if the camera suddenly stops working and we don’t know how it ends. He was still working on it as he died. It plays like a beautiful repellent rough cut, a film drunk on its own madness.
