Strong film...
Visually stunning and Petrenko is fantastic. Has anyone seen Elem Klimov's masterpiece "Come and See"? It's even better.
shareI haven't seen "Come and See" yet, although I should sometime soon. I had actually planned on seeing that first, but with Kino realeasing "Agoniya" recently, I got this first. I thought it was pretty awesome. Although I thought the stock footage could have been used more sparingly, it did give the film a better sense of realism. The kind of over the top style of this film really reminded me of Kubrick. That may be totally off the mark and not really necessary, but I couldn't help but think of Kubrick with the way some of the performances were handled and some of the scenes were composed. Anybody else feel like this? Oh yeah, great performace out of Aleksei Petrenko. Totally compelling.
shareI just saw it through and will watch it again before returning the dvd. Visually stunning of course, with a very rich, baroque style that sort of mirrors those years, which seem to have been - even before 1914 - imbued with a sense of unreality, a surreal, dreamscape quality (as witnessed by people who were around in St Petersburg then).
I wish they had held back some of the documentary footage a bit (soem of this was inserted to get the film officially sanctioned in 1985), it poises the film sometimes uneasily between documentary and drama, but the whole is compelling in many ways [especially the scenes from Rasputin's congregation, and between Rasputin and the Empress).
I would agree with the people who killed Rasputin (an exceptionally lurid assassination, fitting for the man) that he had to go, that he compromised the regime badly (though it was doomed anyway) but so did the czar, Nicholas, who can't have been a very imaginative or gifted man. There were other plans for a coup at the time; Solzhenitsyn's October 1916 which makes a careful and imaginative attempt to catch the last months of the Czarist regime has three men, one of them the government minister and Czar adviser Guchkov, dining in a high-ranking restaurant and outlining a serious attempt to hijack the train of Nicholas and force the Czar to abdicate. That's historically true, even Guchkov's part in the plans, though the uprising of March 1917 came weeks before it was to have happened.