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General Klensky careers around, while the net closes in … Khrustalyov, My Car!
General Klensky careers around, while the net closes in … Khrustalyov, My Car!
General Klensky careers around, while the net closes in … Khrustalyov, My Car!

Khrustalyov, My Car! review – delirious and visually amazing Russian gem

This article is more than 5 years old

A rerelease of Aleksei German’s 1998 satire is a journey into a hallucinatory world shot with documentary realism

There is visual amazement in store for anyone seeing this quite extraordinary re-release from the Russian director Aleksei German – along with disorientation, bafflement, horror and disgust. German’s final film, Hard to Be a God, was released here in 2015, two years after his death.

This is the film that came before, in 1998. It is very loosely inspired by Joseph Brodsky’s essay-memoir In A Room and a Half, which was in fact adapted far more directly in the film by Andrei Khrzhanovsky in 2009.

German’s film is very different. Brodsky’s memories of living with his parents in a tiny St Petersburg apartment after the war and sharing a lavatory and bathroom with dozens of other tenants are merely the starting point for a surreal fantasia-epic and nihilist political satire of cynicism and violence, a parade of brutalities and cruelties which are met with – not cheerfulness exactly, but a robust resilience. Dreamlike scenarios unfold, fragments of gnomic dialogue tumble out, all depicted with a vivid, documentary realism. It is shot in high-contrast black and white, composed of a series of long, unbroken takes and powered by its own hallucinatory momentum. German’s camera’s eye floats through a chaotic sprawl of people arguing, fighting, whispering, plotting, whimpering (with fear) and laughing (with drunken joy).

Khrustalyov, My Car!

The title is taken from the final words spoken in the film by police chief Beria, after the death of Stalin. This moment, on which German infinitesimally freeze-frames, has been intimately witnessed by him and a senior military doctor, General Klensky (Yuriy Tsurilo). Having questioned Klensky about Stalin’s whispered last words to him (the somewhat unheroic “Save me!”), Beria has frowned and then swept away in his official car, to administer whatever new regime can be set up. His imperious command typifies a mix of apparatchik pomposity and unsentimental, bureaucratic despatch. The king is dead, so long live whatever new king we can install in such a way that we don’t get blamed for the death of the old one.

It is General Klensky who is the centre of this bizarre, kaleidoscopic film. It is the story – though that word misleadingly suggests something cogent – of how he was at first arrested as part of the antisemitic doctors’ plot, taken away to a camp, brutally raped in a requisitioned van bizarrely marked with the ad logo for something called “Soviet Champagne” but then released and marched under guard to minister to a certain VIP who has suffered a very important collapse in his health. This is of course Stalin, semi-comatose, and so withered and gaunt that Klensky does not in fact recognise him and asks a stricken party official: “Is he your father?” “Good way to put it,” comes the murmured reply. Very clearly, Klensky has been brought in to take the fall. If he can cure the glorious leader, well and good, but if not they will need someone to blame.

Khrustalyov, My Car!

Before this, Klensky has appeared to be something of a giant: a great, bald, moustachioed bear of a man, like a circus strongman, his military and party rank making him the most important person in their crowded rabbit-warren of an apartment. The film is narrated – intermittently – by his awestruck but lonely young son. Klensky careers bullishly around his teeming flat, sometimes working out with exercise rings, and then storms around the hospital, attended by juniors, tending to brain-surgery patients.

But the net closes in on him at the same time, mysteriously, as a certain fire-stoker is beaten and arrested, almost arbitrarily, evidently for having chanced upon a trio of what look like secret police about to make a hit. Klensky’s prestige will not protect him from the paranoia and fear which German injects into the movie’s own bloodstream. Antisemitism is rife, or, as a party newspaper cynically puts it: “We are not against the Jews, we are against the Zionists! To confuse these concepts would be criminal!” It is not at all clear, in fact, if Klensky is Jewish. But one day in the hospital, Klensky comes across a man, evidently a “foreigner”, who is his exact double. Is the party getting ready to assassinate him, imprison him, or otherwise “disappear” him, using someone to fill his place for the time being?

The mystery of the double is never made plain: usually the punitive effect of arrests is that the disappearance is obvious. But there is a queasy echo with the rumoured “doubles” of Stalin, and with the different sets of twins who loom into view.

“Poetry floats up in my memory like sailboats in the fog,” says someone. And that is how almost every character, every scene, every line floats out of the screen. Very often, German’s camera will drift backwards or sideways, to reveal some new gurning face. What is happening here? Almost every image is a showstopper: a devastating nightmare coup, a composition that would be the crowning moment of a lesser film. But here these searing dream-images come every other moment. Every time the camera moves it is to disclose another macabre situation, another disturbing tableau. A delirious cine-phantasm.

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