Film Review
The acclaimed French novelist Marc Dugain makes an impressive directing
debut with this darkly compelling adaptation of a short story (
I Am Only Stalin) taken from his
2007 anthology
Une exécution
ordinaire, a book which explores Russia's susceptibility to
totalitarian rule from the 1950s to the present day. Rather than
attempt a broad historical fresco, Dugain concentrates his narrative on
a small human drama that revolves around the relationship between
Stalin and a young urologist he pressgangs into becoming his personal
physician. In doing so, the writer-director not only conveys
something of the Stalinist era as experienced by most ordinary people
living in Russia at the time, he also makes a decent stab at unpicking
the psychology of Stalin, one of the most infamous tyrants in history,
and about whom surprisingly little is known.
Right from the very outset, Dugain was keen that André
Dussollier should play Stalin, even though the physical resemblance
between the two men is minimal, to say the least. Dussollier saw
the role as a challenge and even though he initially had reservations
about taking the part he inhabits it with surprising ease; thanks to a
superb make-up job (which took three hours to apply each day) his
appearance is totally transformed into an astonishing similarity of
Stalin in his later years. Dugain's other inspired decision was
to keep the dialogue in French to avoid the distancing effect caused by
dubbing and/or an inadequate translation. As a result, Dugain
manages to craft a daringly intimate portrait of Stalin that takes us
as close to the real man as is perhaps possible for a work of fiction,
and the effect is as chilling as it is instructive.
Dugain makes no attempt to humanise Stalin - to do so would be futile
and fly in the face of documented historical fact. Stalin, the
self-proclaimed Great Architect of Communism, was a manipulative and
sadistic monster, and Dugain's film does nothing to dispel this
illusion. Stalin's dark nature is revealed to us through his
relationship with Anna, the young doctor he continually taunts as she
treats him for his worsening ailments. As we watch the film, we
expect that, eventually, Stalin will relent and develop warmer feelings
for his attentive physician, but this never happens. If anything,
the dictator becomes increasingly cruel towards Anna, threatening not
only her life but also the lives of her husband and parents. With
a staggering insensitivity, he reads to Anna an account of her
husband's arrest and torture, and you feel he is almost goading her
into taking action against him, an impulse that she doggedly resists
through fear of what may result. Whilst we cannot sympathise with him,
Stalin emerges as a tragically pitiful figure, a solitary old man
robbed of the ability to engage with others and therefore condemned to
be in private what he is in public, a soulless dictator without an
ounce of humanity.
Yves Angelo's sombre cinematography, with its limited palette of autumnal browns and
yellows, not only evokes this era of Soviet history perfectly, it also
brings an unbearable Kafkaesque sense of confinement, and the sweet
stench of decay, redolent of a poorly ventilated mortuary, lingers in
almost every scene. We are plunged into a world that is stale and
oppressive, drained of warmth and human feeling, where everyone informs
on everyone else and no one can ever feel safe. The heroine is
forced to separate from her husband, knowing that she is his only
reason for living, through fear that Stalin will have him
arrested. The fear of being denounced makes her easy prey for her
colleagues, who extort indecent favours from her. Stalin
does not appear on screen until thirty minutes into the film, but his
presence is felt right from the off, an all-encompassing force of evil
emanating from the nucleus of the Soviet machine, like the tendrils of
some vile life-sapping plant.
Dugain's mise-en-scène and screenplay are, admittedly, more
theatrical than filmic but this hardly matters, given the quality of
the performances from the fine cast at his disposal. In addition
to the impressive turns from the leads André Dussollier and
Marina Hands, there are strong contributions from the supporting cast:
Edouard Baer, Denis Podalydès, Tom Novembre and Grégory
Gadebois. Podalydès provides the one and only
instance of light relief, as a fussy concierge akin to the comedy
porter in Shakespeare's
Macbeth,
whilst Baer takes us by surprise with an uncharacteristically subdued
performance of touching sobriety and finesse.
In 2002 André Dussollier won a César for his performance
in
La Chambre des officiers
(2001), another adaptation of a Marc Dugain novel (directed by
François Dupeyron). This pales into insignificance when
compared with his portrayal of Stalin in
Une exécution ordinaire,
possibly his finest performance to date. Dussollier's Stalin is
no caricature but an authentic and subtle interpretation of a
hard-to-pin-down historical figure, which is perfectly complemented by
Marina Hands' conflicted portrayal of the woman who is both his victim
and his healer. Through Anna's protracted torment Dugain gives us a
glimpse of the misery endured by those living under Stalin's rule, the
millions whom the dictator cynically regards as a mere statistic.
The archive images that we see at the end of the film, where Stalin is
seen lying in state, fanatically mourned by ordinary Russian people as
if he were a much-loved near-relation, provide a perverse contradiction
of how history remembers the tyrannical leader and assert the paradox
that was Soviet Russia - a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an
enigma, as Churchill once put it. Marc Dugain's film may not
resolve this intractable riddle but it brings us a little closer to
understanding just who Josesph Stalin was, the man behind the icon.
© James Travers 2013
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.