Movie for the day

Nicolas Rapold has an article in The New York Times about an unusual movie from an unusual source:

The future is mired in the muddy, muddy past in Hard to Be a God, Aleksei German’s full-contact, madly outré adaptation of the 1964 science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The film’s helter-skelter action takes place on another planet, but not some gleamingly advanced version of our own. On the parallel world of Arkanar, it’s still the Middle Ages, and the rabble spend their lives tramping through muck, surviving warring factions (or not), and apparently delighting in the total lack of sanitation.
Our guide is a prankish earthling, Don Rumata (played by Leonid Yarmolnik, photo above, a Russian television personality), although “guide” might be a strong word in the context of German’s nearly documentary-like brand of in-the-fray filmmaking. Rumata is one of several visiting scientists blending in as aristocrats, as the vital (and sparse) voice-over explains. His god’s-eye mission of benevolent oversight doesn’t shield him from the crackdowns being instigated by a mighty order of monks.
Yet this isn’t a lucid story of moves and countermoves among political forces, and the stranger in a strange land isn’t so much Rumata as it is the viewer. Hard to Be a God is a cinematic plunge into the warp, weft, and squelch of another time, thrusting us along with Rumata’s wanderings between his squalid chambers and various manor grounds, among soldiers and peasants and prisoners, amid puddles and flames, half-heard asides and yelps of pain.
The roiling setting alone enforces a medieval mind-set that feels genuine: brutal yet often jovially rambunctious and crude, pre-psychological in its sense of the cheapness of life and yet rich with local custom and detail. Our chaotic journey makes Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God look like Downton Abbey. But historical power structures are being laid bare too. German’s work evokes the horrors of post-Communist disarray, and purges in any era, while underplaying the Strugatskys’ more liberating ruminations (and changing the ending).
This isn’t the first time the maverick German (who died in 2013, leaving his wife and son, a director, to finish this film’s postproduction) has delved into the daily ravages of war and oppression. Nor is the richly layered black-and-white film a stylistic departure, for it is the apotheosis of techniques in his films Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), perhaps its closest rival in seething intensity), My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), and even his hard-nosed 1971 war drama, Trial on the Road.
Always an insightfully dynamic framer of images, German choreographs both important and trivial events in the foreground and background in one big danse macabre. Here he pushes into something like Fellini vérité, with faces and swords and buttocks wheeled into and out of view, and people gawking into the camera. He enjoys coming up with effectively discomforting surprises; at one point, chicken legs dangle bafflingly before us.
But German also creates deep panoramas of finely etched beauty, which is part of what has earned the film justifiable comparisons to works by the painters Bruegel and Bosch, not to mention Dante (according to Umberto Eco). German drops a name or two himself, as when Don Rumata mischievously passes off Boris Pasternak’s poem, Hamlet, as his own. In the film, the poem refers to past Soviet censorship, which the filmmaker himself faced, as well as underscoring Rumata’s complex status as a performer with a duty.
All the planet’s his stage, but at the same time, you might wish for an intermission. German’s serpentine takes and dense sound design are relentless, and the tunnel vision of his close-up, cut-less prowls can be exhilarating and exasperating over nearly three hours. There’s a fine line between immersing and drowning the viewer.
If German isn’t keen on explaining his source material, he does look at it with the glint of cynical experience. One crucial bit of dialogue— on the problems of paternalism— is restaged from a dinner scene in the novel, turned into a conversation with a scholar straining to urinate against a wall. German was just as stubborn in sticking to his personal vision (and revisions) as he was innovative in his storytelling, and he’s left behind a final opus that is hard to shake. 

Hard to Be a God
Directed by Aleksei German; written by Svetlana Karmalita and German, based on a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; directors of photography, Vladimir Ilyin and Yuri Klimenko; edited by Irina Gorokhovskaya and Maria Amosova; music by V. Lebedev; production design by Sergei Kokovkin, Georgi Kropachev, and E. Zhukova; costumes by Yekaterina Shapkaitz; produced by Viktor Izvekov and Rushan Nasibulin; released by Kino Lorber. In Russian, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. This film is not rated.

Rico says this won't be showing at the GooglePlex near you, sorry... (Try Netflix in a year.)