Lenin in Winter
The main event for the Ukrainian moviegoers the week before last was, of course, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Taurus, as part of St. Petersburg’s film director’s retrospect show. Even a fleeting glance at history reminds one of the adage that absolute power not only thoroughly corrupts those wielding it, but also maims them as much. In other words, one’s life ends during one’s lifetime. I think that Aleksandr Sokurov dedicated his picture to precisely this topic.
In his production, the Leader, masterfully played by Leonid Mozgovy, is easily recognizable, the one whose countless busts and statues dominate city and town squares all over the former Soviet empire. Yet his Lenin is essentially different from what we know from Soviet textbooks. His Leader belongs to the nineteenth century, fluent — and idiomatic! — in Russian and German; nostalgic about what would have happened if he had an estate by the Volga. Instead of the textbook boiling crack revolutionary passions, we watch and hear an elder’s grumbling, family problems, and spas. Only recently ruling millions of destinies, he is now helplessly ailing, banished to his dacha, isolated from the rest of the world by his Red Parteigenossen. And there is the mustached Uncle Joe sizing up the locality, saying, “The place looks good,” while the guards cast sinister glances through the open door.
Actually, the movie’s chamber atmosphere serves to emphasize personal failures. We are witness to the life of an ordinary man, rather than a Party leader or politician. Everybody in the family calls him Volodia; the old man lives by force of habit, aimlessly, lost in the maze of daily senseless routine, and aware of his approaching death. This is emphasized by the camerawork (Sokurov is also the director of photography), a bleak series of entropic images, as though seen through the Leader’s failing eyes. Everything, every word, gesture, and facial expression is artificial, as though playing out one monstrous scenario — a hunting spree without any rifles or game in the end, dining using “expropriated” (read: stolen) silverware, and medical treatment useless from the outset... The Leader asks his Party Central Committee successor for poison to end his suffering (another absurdity), because he is no longer in a position to change anything. His time is up, so much earlier than anticipated.
The finale, however, is strikingly compassionate. The Leader’s phone suddenly comes alive. A call from the Central Committee; perhaps they have finally made up their mind about allowing him hemlock. The Leader reclines in his armchair, looking at the sky, focusing on a clearing between the clouds, and for the first time we see a human, rather than acidly ironic, smile on his lips.
