Chrustaljov, mašinu!

Russian and Soviet history has been one of my hobbies since high school, so I have quite decent knowledge about the Stalinist Soviet Union, the case of the Jewish doctors, and Stalin's death. I felt that Alexej German's film would be an interesting confrontation of the director's artistic ideas about that time period with mine. Honestly, after the first viewing, I felt like a beetle that had lost its way in an anthill because, even after an hour of desperate effort, I couldn't recognize anything in the film, the sequence of images, and the characters presented by the director. I couldn't finish the film, and originally, I considered giving it a Boo! rating. After a second viewing, properly prepared and informed about what awaited me, I managed to make it to the end credits, and I can change my review to a fair two stars. German did not consider the viewer at all and subordinated the film's structure to his artistic intention, which, I'm afraid, will be indigestible for the majority of viewers. His film is strong in its details, in individual scenes where he can perceive and capture the absurdity of life in late Stalinist Russia, but it fails as a cohesive story that should captivate the viewer and provide an overall picture of the era and the country. From this perspective, it is much better to watch titles such as Burnt by the Sun and The Feasts of Valtasar, or The Night with Stalin. Overall impression: 40%. It is a typical festival, or rather club, film with no chance of succeeding with a wider audience. However, there exists a minority of viewers who approach a film as a puzzle that needs to be deciphered, and they will probably derive genuine joy from German's film because understanding the chaos and bringing order to it will take a long time... (25.06.2006)

From the very beginning, German's work gives the impression of a chaotic cocoon of sounds, disparate dialogues, hard-to-recognize characters... The effort to give the impression of unstylized events, in which the camera (and with it the viewer) is only visiting, results in feelings of confusion and frantic rambling, which is only directed by the character of the boy-narrator with occasional barks. The plot skeleton only looms slowly under the mass of false sounds and shards of events. Russia in 1953 looks like an absolute madhouse, its inhabitants (in this film the "narrowing" of the inhabitants of one house) give the impression of overly affected and illogically-reacting inmates. German's view is typically Russian, and it includes irony, sharp twists into tragedy, bizarreness, frantic gradient of narration that can seem like a mess to an "untrained" viewer, but on closer inspection there is great narrative skill and order. Khrustalyov, My Car! resurrects the atmosphere of the 1950s in the USSR not only from the point of view of the ordinary citizen (constantly sliding and humiliated heater), but also from the point of view of the elite (the central character of General Glinsky)... But they are united by the cruel and manipulative domination of power from which one cannot escape (black cars...). The fundamental questions of the time come into play with admirable ease - there will be no answers, but after all, this piece is based on "documentary" value. In my opinion, the Russian-French film works with the same kind of "realistic" metaphor as Kusturica’s Underground, although it handles ad absurdum and is not nearly as grateful from an audience point of view. Alexei German has talent, but still his message has only a few strong emotional moments (especially the rape of the general by drunk men); otherwise, his black-and-white coldness, director's distance and confusing structure keep it more of a film for the invited. Which, on the other hand, is not a mistake. (18.01.2005)

I could probably spend twenty years of my life just watching Alexei German's films on repeat. Untangling each scene in turn, looking for what's related to the main plot line, what's related to the minor ones, dissecting the characters, figuring out what's related to the plot at all, and if not, why it's in the scene in the first place. A total mayhem that ties together none other than a terrifying caravan of anonymous black limousines pulling out of a monumental Kremlin nest. From my personal point of view, Khrustalyov is a testament to the ultimacy of the cinematic medium in portraying a certain zeitgeist, a subjective insight, and the inherent chaotic and elusive qualities of human nature. (08.09.2020)