This film is my first foray into contemporary Russian cinema, a kind of cinema of rare international spread and virtually unknown here in Western Europe. Although I was expecting something else, I wasn't very disappointed because I didn't expect too much either. The true Zohar is a series of commentaries to the Torah, written to clarify their reading and interpretation, a concern for the Jews of that period, as they increasingly faced the need to hide their faith and spread out. Thus, Zohar was a naturally codified book, addressed to Jewish judges and priests and made to prevent them from coming out of orthodoxy. Despite that, these film's Zohar is a kind of magical parchment with secrets about the nature of Man's existence. In addition, the film relies on the ever-controversial idea of reincarnation, as a way for Man to correct their mistakes and evolve, a concept imported from Hinduism and Eastern philosophies a few decades ago, by New Age theorists and shamans.
Thus, the fim's script is the story of a character, originally Roman, who finds a magical scroll that he must return to it's rightful place, and this task becomes a duty passed from reincarnation to reincarnation, in a game of cat and mouse that we hardly understand and that ends up becoming repetitive and annoying. The succession of lives and historical contexts makes everything meaningless and we begin to think what the hell of movie we're watching. The dialogues of spiritualistic content couldn't be more boring, enigmatic and hermetic. Historical likelihood is also debatable, especially with regard to costumes of some periods. Thus, the final product is a confusing and repetitive film, absurdly imaginative and implausible as a surrealistic dream. The nature of the parchment is never explained and the lack of connection between the audience and the main character makes us never worry about what happens to him.
