Konstantin Lopushansky (Russia, 1947),
Andrei Tarkovskii's assistant on Stalker (1979), debuted
with the apocalyptic Pisma Myortvogo Cheloveka/ Letters from a Dead Man (1986), scripted by sci-fi writers Vyacheslav Rybakov and Boris Strugatsky and photographed by Nikolai Pokoptsev, a film that feels like a version of
Stalker for a post-nuclear apocalypse.
The film is a brief parable about the responsibility of scientists and about
the value of human life, all human life.
The film is presumably set after a nuclear attack.
A man (played by Rolan Bykov) is writing a letter to his son Eric. He writes in the dark, and his wife
is lying by him sick. He turns on the ventilation. There are other people lying
around in
the underground shelter (the basement of a museum).
The man confesses that he doesn't know what time it is.
He wears a gas mask and ventures outside, climbing over a pyramid of ruins.
There are people walking among the rubble swept by a strong wind.
An inspector visits an orphanage.
The traumatized orphans don't speak and don't move. The inspector
doesn't care about the little orphans: they are condemned to die, one way or another while healthy people will be moved to a central bunker.
When their old priest objects, the inspector reminds him that they are living
under martial law and that old men too are disposable.
Back to the underground shelter,
we see a man digging a grave for a dead man.
The letter writer's wife, who is very sick, accuses her husband of having gone
mad before the war. We learn he is a scientist who won the Nobel Prize.
She indirectly accuses him of having created the technology that destroyed the world.
In her dream she saw their son Eric burned alive outside
Some of their fellow refugees want to leave the shelter and move to the central bunker.
Outside helicopers and military tanks roam the landscape.
THe scientist defies curfew to go and get medicine and food from a friend.
The friend tells him that the order has been issued to
evacuate to the central bunker, and that people are expected to spend
30 or 50 years underground.
The scientist, always wearing a gas mask, visits a black market trying to
trade meat for a painkiller.
He barely escapes a military raid on the black market.
It's all in vain: his wife dies and is buried in a grave that he himself has to dig.
The scientist revisits the day that nuclear war started.
We see the missiles being launched and cities being annihilated.
The flashback shows the scientist venturing outside into a
world on fire to find his wife Anna and his son Eric, witnessing the
horror and suffering of the population in the streets and in the hospitals.
The men in the shelter have philosophical discussions
about the suicidal stupidity of human civilization.
One of them gives a lengthy speech and then kills himself.
The scientist, wearing the gas mask, ventures into a liquid magma to rescue
books. Another scinetist, also wearing a gas mask, speculates that it was not
a war but a programmed apocalypse.
Books are now used to make fire.
All the people abandon the shelter for the central bunker but the scientist decides
to stay there with the orphan children, who are not admitted to the bunker and
whom a woman brings to the scientist's shelter.
The scientist keeps writing to his son Eric. He has calculated that today is
Christmas, and it started snowing, and he builds a Christmas tree out of scrap metal and candles with help from the children (who never speak).
He then sets a clock surmounted by a globe to almost midnight, grabs all the children and waits for the globe to strike midnight.
The scientist dies and a child summarizes the story:
a woman named Teresa led the children to the shelter,
and a man with no name adopted them, and
on Christmas day he gathered
everyone around the Christmas tree
and lit the candles and told them that they would see the star in the sky,
but there were no stars in the sky
because darkness had enveloped the world, and he lay down dying, and
then the eldest child asked the dying man if he had told them the truth.
We then see the children marching in the snow.
Are they marching to their death or to a new genesis?
This formed the first part of his "apocalyptic" trilogy, continued with
the next two films, all photographed by Nikolai Pokoptsev.
The two-hour
Posetitel Muzeia/ The Museum Visitor (1989), almost double the length
of the first installment,
this time written by Lopushansky himself and with Viktor Mikhaylov as the lead actor (he played a young man in the first film).
The film suffers from poor editing and too much darkness, but has powerful scenes that highlight the moral decay that parallels the physical decay of the world.
The story is set in the post-apocalypse.
An unnamed man (Mikhaylov)
carries a suitcase through a landscape of rubble and lava,
haunted by something that follows him, while
the wind, metallic noises and thunder fill the otherwise mute landscape.
People silently scavenge a mound of smoking debris.
Mikhaylov, coughing heavily because of the dust, inquires about the train that carries garbage and is welcomed inside a tavern that has light.
He asks why the tavern has a fire smoldering outside and the owner explains that
there is a reservation of "degenerates", who always try to climb inside,
especially at night, and the fire is to keep them out.
Mikhaylov is trying to visit a flooded museum. The innkeeper warns him that
many die. The museum is above the waters only during low tide, which lasts seven days. Many get lost when the tide recedes and die when the tide rises.
The "tourist" says that he wants to touch it with his own hands.
The innkeeper's father, who is superstitious, asks the tourist to open the Bible at a random page and point at a random sentence, a procedure that is supposed to tell the future. The tourist's finger points at a passage that is about resurrection.
The tourist jumps on the slow-moving garbage train and reaches an intact building by the sea. It's another inn, and he takes a room.
He dines with the innkeepers, husband and wife, and their servants.
The innkeepers explain that the servants are degenerates.
40% of children are born "degenerate" (which presumably means "mentally disabled").
The degenerates still believe in religion and celebrate the
Feast of Branches, during which they set branches on fire, despite being afraid of fire.
The male innkeeper warns the tourist about the dangers of the hike to the museum.
He confirms that many die attempting it.
The degenerates don't even try because they are dumb and weak.
The tourist asks to consult old books about the museum. The male innkeeper
doesn't believe in religion and argues that all priests are generates,
but the tourist quotes Christian scriptures.
We learn that the museum is actually a city, and the mound is its center.
The innkeeper tells the tourist that it is mandatory to register before visiting the museum.
The female innkeeper is upset that her husband allowed the two servants to invite friends for the Feast of Branches. The servants apologize, always behaving like meek retards.
The maid escorts the tourist to get his permit. He asks her if it's possible
to see the priests and she refuses to escort him there, but she tells him out
to access the temple: just repeat the sentence "Let me out of here", which is their only prayer.
As they approach the reservation, they witness thousands of degenerates screaming behind the fences, begging to be released.
He reaches the office that issues the permits, and again he is warned of the dangers, including the chemical waste. The office is located in a hellish factory where degenerates work silently like robots.
The tourist is determined to carry out his mission but we see that at night he has a panic attack and has the vision of a man climbing a mound.
He wakes up because the female innkeeper is yelling at the degenerates, but her
husband shouts back that they are their children.
The maid, terrified, looks for protection in the tourist's room.
Over breakfast the male innkeeper remarks that everybody discusses the
ecological catastrophe but nobody wants to change anything,
nobody cares what will happen in the future.
The maid suffers an epileptic attack and claims to be possessed by "someone else".
The male innkeeper is educating a degenerate. The retard keeps quoting the scriptures.
The male innkeeper calls them superstitions and asserts that God never existed.
The retard cries.
The tourist ventures into a monastery run by priests and hears the mass being officiated in which the priests pray to the "Presaged One" who will climb the mound of the submerged city and to the Intercessor who will mediate between them and him in the final days, the two prophecies in which the degenerates believe.
When he returns to the inn, the female innkeeper calls him "mad" for visiting the monastery in the degenerate zone.
The claustrophobic atmosphere is broken when the innkeepers throw a wild party.
The tourist decides to return to the city. When she's him leaving, the maid gets hysterical and begs him to stay, thinking that he is one of the men of the prophecies. The tourist stops again at the first inn by the railway and that innkeeper tries to convince him to stay and the innkeeper's father is still reading the Bible for clues about the future.
The tourist has another emotional crisis, mumbling that it's all a prison and they are just marionettes.
The innkeeper's wife suspects that he's a degenerate and wants to report him,
but her husband is busy watching a football game on television.
The tourist seems to calms down but seconds later he we see
thousands of screaming ecstatic candle-carrying degenerates lay siege to the seaside inn (the second inn) and the tourist is there, delirious, crying "Shame!" and asking the innkeepers to be forgiven (no explanation is given how he traveled back to the seaside and why).
The mob captures him, drugs him, carries on a wooden board to the monastery.
It all happens in the dark.
Priests strip him and wash him in front of a now composed audience while we hear the obsessive chanting of the officiating priest.
He behaves like he is in a trance and meekly accepts that they put a black cassock. Then the crowd lines up to touch him.
The priests begin a solemn procession, followed by the thousands of degenerates carrying their candles. They reach the sea, which is now mostly dry, and let him walk away. It all happens in the darkness.
Finally there is light. He gets on his knees and recites verses from
"Psalm 130". There are skeletons in the receding water.
He collapses in the sand, then gets up again, unstable.
It's a long hypnotic whispered prayer in which he
asks God to have mercy on him. And then it's dark again.
And then it's light again and a storm is raging.
The delirious tourist keeps walking, psychologically and physically exhausted,
braving the waves and the lightning. He reaches the city and climbs the mound
like in his dream, still delirious, still praying, still begging, until he stands in front of a cross that surmounts the city.
He returns to the inn and we see him (but not hear him) shouting outside the window.
Then he's frantically climbing a heap of trash and screaming.
He then stumbles through the rubble screaming in a rising sound of birds.
Russkaia Simfoniia/ Russian Symphony (1994), which came out after the collapse of the Soviet Union, temporarily closed the trilogy.
It is by far the most complex of the three films.
Unlike the previous two chapters, this one is characterized by amateurish and almost parodistic acting, and initially looks like a tribute to the satirical tradition of old Soviet comedies, except that the object of the satire here is the Soviet Union itself: the rubble and the Last Judgment seem to be allegories for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But then the film transforms slowly into a
dense web of philosophical metaphors
that mix with the satirical allegories
and with erudite historical refences.
The film starts swinging between farce and tragedy.
A comic (and critical) representation of Russian life mixes with a desperate
search for God and the meaning of it all.
It's like a meeting of
Theodoros Angelopulos,
Andrei Tarkovsky and
Otar Iosseliani.
The film opens with the theatrical stream of consciousness of a man, Ivan
(Viktor Mikhaylov again), preparing for God's universal judgement, convinced that the war has started between God and the devil. Ivan, who think of himself as the heir to the tradition of Russian intellectuals, is in a room with two women (one calls the other "mother") and suddenly starts screaming that he forgot the children of an orphanage and they will drown.
The water is rising everywhere and quickly.
The two women thinks he is either mad or drunk. They alternatively scream and laugh. Ivan takes a closet and we see later that he uses it as a boat because the waters are rising. He stares at the mirror of the closet and doesn't recognize his own face. He reaches the orphanage when hundreds of children and their female guardians are panicking and takes command. The waters are rising and he sends the children to the third floor.
The female guardians feel that Ivan has to go in person to the authorities and
make him (comically) rehearse the scene of how he will demand
a motorboat to save the children from the official in charge,
Vozduhina.
Ivan has to wade through a large parade and riots to reach Vozduhina.
She tells him that there is nothing she can do and sounds sincere.
Vozduhina is busy with all sort of emergencies, assisted by
a general who looks like Brezhnev and wears shorts because long pants would get wet.
Ivan's stream of consciousness does sound delirious.
We see a religious procession (which appears to be documentary footage) as if people truly believed that the Last Judgment is coming.
Ivan then visits a man that owns a typewriter and dictates a letter to
Vozduhina. His first draft is too long and vague, starting with a description
of how he is stuck because of the Last Judgment. Sanya helps
him revise the letter to make it more effective.
He explains, crying, that the children have already suffered a lot and are traumatized.
The trio is impressive by his story, but not out of compassion: they sense that
it's a good story that a publisher could pay good money for.
Ivan tries to deliver his typed letter just when
people are protesting in the streets and breaking into
government buildings and the officials are coming out after stripping naked.
Vozduhina herself walks out naked in a ritual of public self-humiliation.
Ivan is ignored by everybody.
We then see drunk people among the rubble.
Ivan gives a lengthy philosophical speech to the workers of a factory that has been burning for a week.
People listen silently but then ignore completely his message and go partying merrily in the streets.
Then suddenly we see people pouring water on a feverish Ivan.
Ivan visits a family of refugees and cries. Asked who he is and what he wants,
he replies that he doesn't know and just wants to mourn.
To cheer him up, the women show him the
drawings of their crippled boy Georgi and ask the other child,
Alik, to play the cello.
Then Ivan is again making his way through a crowd.
Ivan then addresses a group of what appears to be 19th-century aristocrats.
One of them plays a recording that to us sounds like wind but he claims it's
the voice of the writer Bely and he announces that history has ended.
Back to the people of the typewriter, Sanya gives Ivan a confused lecture about
Russia being soaked in blood and admits that he can't sleep because of the children.
Ivan, dressed like a czarist official, runs into
Vozduhina, who now behaves like a witty whore.
Ivan climbs a fence to enter a building where influential people are congregating. A janitor sees him and raises the alarm: the janitor is Mikhail Gorbachev,
who is sweeping around and telling anecdotes of his meeting with the US president.
Gorbachev and his wife Raisa are reading
Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot" when Ivan approaches them asking for
a motorboat to save the children.
Outside people are celebrating as the religious procession goes on, led by the top priests.
Ivan mingles with them.
Then we see again people celebrating in the streets and the uniforms seem to be from a century earlier and flags of the Mensheviks are being waved.
Sanya invites Ivan to board the revolutionary train and gives a rousing speech,
even invoking the battle of Kulikovo (where the Russians defeated the Mongols).
It is all very chaotic.
Ivan then reads to Sanya the letter that he has written for the authorities about the case of the children, but it has turned into a novel about himself, his own mission, and into a spiritual pamphlet.
The Menshevik legions leave the train and, led by horsemen, march through the night, a human river, while a priest invokes a divine patriotic mission to save their devastated homeland. They now look like medieval knights and are heading towards Kulikovo.
The priest calls it "the holy war with the Antichrist".
THe horsemen and the marchers stop at the field of Kulikovo.
A delirious dwarf shouts confused sentences.
The chaotic atmosphere increases, with horsemen riding everywhere, soldiers dragging cannons, marching troops, and an ecstatic crowd cheering communist officials.
Among them are the two female guardians of the orphans who are delighted to recognize Ivan.
The whole ceremony stops because two coiffeurs cut Ivan's hair and give him a smiling face.
Sanya is shocked and asks who gave the order but the coiffeurs don't know.
Then someone drags Ivan and Sanya back to the parade
(in a czarist-era carriage). Ivan is taken to the podium, and introduced
with great pomp as "the intellectual", a successor of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,
and he gives a political speech to the crowd,
which includes Vozduhina and the general.
He contradicts everything he has said before: he has converted to the era's spirit of selfishness and mocks the idea of providing a
motorboay to save children.
Thunder and lightning plunge the field into darkness.
Only Ivan seems able to stand up, everybody else is swept away by the water.
Ivan returns home to an old woman, Semyonovna (never introduced before), keeping his head down. The old woman almost doesn't recognize him. He tells her that he killed orphans: they all drowned.
He is not sure he is alive anymore.
An angel told him in a dream something about a curtain and then he dreamed of
his own death.
He tells the old woman that he only has one more question to answer, a question
about God.
We then see him crawling in a landscape of endless snow dressed in torn
pilgrim clothes.
We don't hear his voice but he appears to be praying and shouting.
Konets Veka/ End of the Century (2001)
Gadkie Iebedi/ The Ugly Swans (2006), based again on
Strugatsky
material (their 1967 novel), added a fourth chapter to the
trilogy of the apocalypse.
The film is a very simplified version of the novel and it sometimes focuses on
inessential details from the book and only superficially explores other more
important aspects.
The ending is also different than the one in the novel.
Victor Banev is on a train that is blocked by fires.
He visits a midget named Valentin Pilman and introduces himself as a
Russian writer who lives in the USA and works for the
United Nations. The midget lets him in but points a gun at him suspicious
that Victor was able to find him. Victor actually knows that someone tried to
assassinate the midget. The midget is entitled to fear for his life.
Victor gives the most incredible explanation for how he was able to track down
Pilman: he
saw his house in a dream, address and all. And surprisingly Pilman
believes him and turns friendly.
Victor read Pilman's report about the
Mokretsy/ Aquatters in the town of Tashlinsk and is puzzled.
Pilman tells Victor that in his opinion the Aquatters are enemy aliens of human civilization.
The Aquatters have de-facto seized the town's children and Pilman thinks it's a plan to control the future.
Victor meets his wife Lyudmila, who is desperate: she
spent a fortune to put their daughter Ira into the boarding school of that town, thinking it was a school for geniuses,
and hasn't been able to talk or see her since.
We now know that Victor has a personal reason to volunteer on that mission to the mysterious town.
Victor travels by air and boat to Tashlinsk.
He is welcomed by the United Nations official in charge, Isaac "Ike" Golemba, and by his top scientist Genady Komov
(note: a character from other Strugatskys' books, but not in this one):
they have established a commission to study the climate disaster that is affecting the town (the town is constantly flooded).
Ike tells Victor that the
military are planning to take action: evacuate people and wage
chemical war against the Aquatters, with the excuse that the Aquatters are
sick people who might infect others.
They pass by a flooded city and reach the boundary beyond which lies a dangerous wasteland. Ike escorts Victor to a set of chairs where prospective visitors are vetted by the Aquatters. Ike explains that nobody knows the criteria by which
Aquatters decide whom to admit and recommends that Victor looks friendly.
Victor sees
that a previous visitor was killed upon arrival for failing the test.
An Aquatter comes and simply stares at Victor's facial expression and allows
them to rescue the dead one.
They return to their headquarters.
Victor is invited to a meeting in which a man called
Sumak wants to study aliens and children. He thinks that
children are enemies and are being raised to destroy the world.
A boy, Boris, comes to invite Victor to the school. We learn that Victor has
a daughter and she is one of the students.
That night Victor sees a halo rising over the town.
The town seems abandoned, patroled by military police.
He has a vision of his daughter speaking to him, and he doesn't seem shocked.
The following day Victor visits the school and
addresses his daughter's class.
A child accuses him of writing nothing positive in his books, which contradicts
with his statement that is noble. The children agree with
the need for spiritual renewal of humankind.
These children discuss like philosophers.
Their Aquatter teacher, Zinovy, enters and sits among them.
Ira is very cold towards Victor. Victor witnesses Zinovy's class: he has taught
the children how to levitate.
Finally alone with Ira, Victor tells her that he wants to take her away because
soon there might be chemical warfare. She refuses and tells him to go away.
Sumak visits Victor.
Sumak thinks that children decide which adults live and which die.
The Aquatter are humans who suffer from a
genetic disease that has been determined not infectious.
Ike's assistant Diana calls Victor: she has found Sumac dead.
Victor dines with Ike in a flooded restaurant, despite water up to their knees.
Ira sent him an audiovisual message that he cannot decipher.
Ike warns him that
the Aquatters have children make imprints of consciousness.
Victor asks whether the Aquatters' disease is infectious, and Ike resplies
"yes and no". Ike had it and healed. One has the will to resist.
Victor plays his daughter's disk on his computer: Ira's voice recites a poetic prayer.
Later, Victor has a nightmare, as if Ira's prayer did something to his brain.
In the middle of the night the police orders a total evacuation because the waters are rising.
Diana put the children in a bus but they disappeared. Victor takes a car and
goes looking for them.
Gennady hands Ike the formula for chemical warfare that will kill everything.
Diana calls that the children refuse to be evacuated: they know that the
Aquatters will be killed.
Ike warns Victor that the chemical bomb will kill everybody in a few minutes and advises him to take shelter in the school and carefully block all vents of the school.
Victor convinces Zinovy to convince the children to be saved.
Another Acquatter, however, tells him that the children don't want to be "normal" again.
Victor and Diana bring the children to a sealed room while the gas begins to spread into the school, killing all the Aquatters.
Some time later Victor visits his daughter in a hospital.
Ira behaves like she has been lobotomized.
Victor gets furious with the doctors and demands to take Ira away.
A doctor explains that they just can't find a way to heal the children.
We see Ira staring from a window at the sky.
Rol/ The Role (2013), set during the 1917 revolution, feels like a riff
on Roberto Rossellini’s General DellaRovere.
Skvoz Chyornoe Steklo/ Through the Black Glass (2019)
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