KHROUSTALIOV, MY CAR!
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
Director: Aleksei Guerman Writer: Svetlana Karmalita, Aleksei Guerman Cast: Yuro Tsourilo, Nina Rouslanova, Yuri Yarvet, Michael Dementiev, A. Bachirov
Just before a press screening began for this Russian hodgepodge, the director, Aleksei Guerman, discussed it in Russian. His message was translated by a woman at his side, a translation that drew laughs from the audience of critics precisely because of her competence in furnishing the helmer's mood. In a talk that could have been designed by Woody Allen, he related the many times that the film was shelved, adding that each time it was screened the audience tended to walk out. His conversation could have been taken as cute, self-deprecatory behavior but he was so on the mark that one suspects he was plain embarrassed by the ineptness of the work and was seeking to distance himself from it. Purportedly a satire on the grim situation in the Soviet Union during Stalin's last year in office (1953), "Khroustaliov, My Car!" is, as New York Times critic Stephen Holden states, "virtually indecipherable." He's being kind: "virtually" does not belong in that sentence.
Guerman depicts a Russian landscape with perpetual darkness and snow, a gulag-like nightmare so bleak that you'd think Stalin himself ordered the weather. In the story's beginning a man approaches his car, is dragged away by two men just before he opens the door, and is imprisoned in a closet-like box in the snow. The scene is anything but naturalistic, and that's OK, but the absurdist vision which follows is so incomprehensible that even a course in advanced semiotics would not help the viewer.
"Khroustaliov" focuses on a Red Army general, Yuri Ginshi (Yuri Tsourilo), a bald, mustached creep who is so obnoxious you've got to wonder how he was able to attract even his dour, disagreeable mistress. When he is at home with his family, he watches as the folks run around helter skelter for no apparent reason, all howling irrationally. (If members of the audience behaved like that at a screening of the film, they could not be said to be irrational.) While he is surrounded by bootlickers of all stripes, Yuri is ultimately arrested and sent to the gulag during an anti-Semitic purge, where he is attacked by his captors and anally raped.
While Yuri undergoes considerable torment before he is recalled to treat the ailing Stalin, nothing about the film succeeds in vilifying the infamous dictator who is responsible for ordering the execution of more of his own people than Hitler liquidated en toto. Any member of the audience who can sit through this 137 minute disaster should be awarded the Order of Lenin.
Not Rated. Running Time: 137 minutes.(C) 1998 Harvey Karten
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