Arrepentimiento

My only complaint about Tengiz Abuladze's REPENTANCE (English title) is that I am uncertain what was real and what was fantasy. However, since this was undoubtedly his intention, I cannot properly call it a complaint. Outside of David Lynch films, I have never seen more perfectly executed dream imagery than that of REPENTANCE; the beauty of these sequences is accentuated by the surreal atmosphere of the various dreamers' waking lives. The cast is uniformly excellent, the premise unique, and much of the dialogue resonates with beauty, despair and universal truth, often mingled with humor. No character is utterly devoid of sympathy, nor is any character entirely sympathetic. All is ambiguous, just as it is in our own so-called "reality".

Joseph Stalin's purges were one of the most horrific chapters in Soviet history. A famous movie about this period is Nikita Mikhalkov's "Burnt by the Sun". An equally important one is Tengiz Abuladze's "Repentance". This one emphasizes not only the terror visited upon the population, but the efforts to expose the truth and prevent whitewashing of those who committed the genocide. The subject is a man who shares physical similarities with Hitler and Stalin, but is based on Lavrentiy Beria (one of Stalin's acolytes). As mayor of a town in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, he doesn't hesitate to persecute those whom he deems disloyal. Years later, a woman goes to unusual lengths to reveal the truth about his handiwork.

Not surprisingly, the movie couldn't get released immediately. It wasn't until after Gorbachev came to power that it got a release. I'd say that the ugly parts of history are more important to know about that the pleasant parts of history, to ensure that they don't get repeated. I understand that Beria was particularly vicious.

We don't get to see many movies from Georgia. I wish that I could see more of them. Part of it is that I like getting to see cultures that we don't often get to see, but I would also like to have more insight into their perspective on things. As the 2008 war made clear, Russo-Georgian tensions didn't end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Anyway, it's an outstanding movie. While it is a bit long, the plot makes up for that. I recommend it.

This wonderful Georgian film emerged from the last years of the Soviet regime, but seems to have disappeared without trace. The final film of a trilogy by the veteran film-maker Tengiz Abuladze, it portrays a composite monster, Varlam (Hitler moustache, Mussolini shirt & braces, Stalin boots, Beria pince-nez) and his equally grotesque son Abel, both played by the same actor.

The film has a surrealist, dreamlike quality about it, framed by initial and final scenes in a cake-shop and with police almost comic in medieval armour. The main actions which initiate the plot are surrealist with the repeated exhumation of Varlam's corpse. The two monstrous central characters are no more than mayors of a small Georgian town - but there is nothing comic about their actions and the reign of terror they bring to the community. The elements of tyranny are revealed economically, with hints of atrocities and disappearances but only one brief torture scene. The overall message is that of personal responsibility. The tyrannical regime is not an anonymous bureaucracy but the deliberate creation of evil men. And the final repentance is a horrific recognition of those responsibilities. An unmissable film, beautifully made and superbly acted - if you can find it.

After the death of Stalin, folks in the Soviet Union were allowed to express their feelings towards his reign of terror...at least to a point. However, the government also was concerned that these complaints might lead to complaints about the current system--and this is probably why "Repentance" was banned for several years after it was filmed. It does attack the Stalinist era and mentality--but apparently those in power at the time weren't willing to allow such a film to be released.

"Repentance" is a very surreal sort of film--one which has many story elements that seem dreamy and unreal while the rest of it is quite literal. While there were purges, seeing the 20th century purges carried out by knights in armor, a living statue of Justice and many other story elements are dream-like and strange. This is not really a complaint--just an observation. The film looks almost like Dalí or Buñuel added a few touches here and there...just a few.

The story begins in the present day. The beloved mayor of a Georgian town, Varlem, has died and folks come to his funeral to pay their respects. However, several times after the funeral, the body of this man has been taken from the crypt and placed in his yard! After the third time, they catch the woman responsible and she is taken into custody. At the hearing, she openly admits having done it and tells a story of long ago--when Varlem first became mayor. At that time, he made a name for himself persecuting the innocent--and the story is about how this impacted the woman personally.

Following her long tale, the story goes to the present day. The hypocrisy and evil of Valem's friends are examined as well--including one case about a man who struggles between Atheism and Christianity. Under Christianity, he SHOULD feel guilt--and he ultimately gets to meet the Devil (this is pretty weird...and clever). Other folks all begin to confront their own part in Varlem's reign of terror.

Instead of this film directly attacking Stalinism, it clearly attacks these tactics on a smaller scale. And, I am sure it was not unintentional that Varlem looked much like a bloated Hitler! A very strange but daring film. While today it might be seen as very tame, back in the mid-1980s it must have caused the filmmakers a lot of problems--and potentially prison. Quite clever but quite slow and strange. Well worth seeing--especially if you lived through this era.

The movie starts with a newspaper obituary recording the death of Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a town in Georgia. We're then shown what has happened in the town in the past when Varlam was mayor. He's nominally a communist type, however it's made pretty clear that his stripes, and the stripes of all Stalinists, are feudal. This is shown, for example, by having the police of the town dressed as mediaeval knights. It's an idea explored in Iosseliani's Brigands too, that Russian rulers have been a succession of crazed autocratic knaves.

At one point in the film Varlam plaintively quotes from Shakespeare's sonnet 66:

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly doctor-like controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Which is a harangue against everything he stands for. He's a man who has knowingly chosen to do wrong, a comedian who has turned his fiefdom into a comedy of terror. At one point he arranges for his son to jump out of a second story window to shock his captive audience, but in fact the boy is caught below. He surrounds himself with illiterate sycophants whom he brings into and out of favour arbitrarily, arranges for people to be arrested and benevolently releases them when complaints are made. In the end however he's merely a snake playing with its live food before devouring.

Varlam arranges for people to be exiled, presumably to Siberia although we're not told. One day a shipment of logs arrives on the outskirts of town. They have been logged by the kidnapped men of the town. Each survivor has carved their name into the end of the timber. Women from the town trudge around the muddy lumberyard looking for their husbands' names, looking for proof of life for men denied the right of correspondence. This is the most powerful scene in my opinion.

There are also a number of dream scenes and very surreal scenes that are very appealing in their artistry, which I leave the reader to discover for themselves.

Varlam is, as has been pointed out, a concoction of dictators (superficially containing elements of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin), but may well, in more concrete terms be based on a real life figure, Georgian-born Lavrentiy Beria, a man more unpleasant than the imaginations of most can conjure up. He was Stalin's chief murderer, a sexual sadist who performed unimaginable feats of depravity, he also briefly participated in the running of Russia as part of a "troika" after Stalin's death. The film does not dwell on the huge depths of his depravities, as the acts he performed are unspeakable and unfilmable. The film is a quiet but firm indictment however of Stalinist politics, of the manipulation and double-think and an ode to Georgian culture.

The purpose of the film is to not let Beria, or more generally the authoritarians of the time, rest in peace; to act as testament to the cruel depravities of the Stalinist era.

In my opinion it's absolutely unmissable.