Cecil says:
I just caught The Death of Stalin before its run finished at
Castlemaine’s Theatre Royal, and I sat with friends on the sofas downstairs for
the first time (though without Bea this time, sadly).
I heard mixed things about the film, but I have to say I
liked it. I’m not a big fan of Armando Iannucci and found his political TV
satires to be too cynical – I even saw him once at a Q&A at the Ritzy in
Brixton and wanted to walk out, I disliked him so much, but was caught in the
middle of the cinema that day and was stuck. Funnily enough, one couple did
walk out in the middle of The Death of Stalin, for whatever reason…
I actually liked its quirky mix of personality minutiae,
making it almost farcical or absurd at times (but, you know, it MUST be yukky
to have to kneel in someone’s piss if you’re wearing your best suit, and I’m
sure those pall bearers at funerals do have dodgy moments where they think
they’re about to drop the coffin…), with the gloomy and sinister political
developments as Stalin’s reign of terror comes to an end, only to be –
apparently – followed almost immediately by an equally sinister regime under
Beria.
I didn’t know much about Beria, to be honest, except as a
Stalin thug, though some of the other personalities were familiar of course:
Molotov, Khrushchev, even Zhukov. Funnily enough, I was just discussing with
the friends before the film started what was the sequence of Soviet leaders,
and none of us recalled who led the country between Stalin and Khrushchev –
well, watch this film, and learn.
The casting worked well for me, too. I’m not sure how
American audiences will react to a cockney Stalin, or precious English-sounding
Beria, but they’ll relate to Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev, I’m sure.
Most poignant scene: the line-up of prisoners being
summarily shot one by one, until the order comes through to stop the shooting,
with no explanation, and we focus for a moment on the next guy in the line,
whose life was so randomly saved.
What a turbulent time this must have been, and all of it a
mere 36 years after the biggest upheaval of them all, with the 1917 revolution.
Thinking in contemporary terms, that means looking back to 1982, and the
Falklands might seem a long time ago, but it is within living memory very
easily for someone of my age. So Russia went through so much in those years.
I was also remembering our encounter in Tbilisi with the
family whose grandparents had served the teenage Stalin when he was sent to buy
the family’s weekly supply of wine and tea (bourgeois lot, they were,
apparently). None of this film was set in Georgia, but still it brought back
happy memories yet again of our epic overland trip to Australia…
I was also reminded of a politics lecture I attended in 1983
at the Sorbonne, when the lecturer mentioned Stalin dying on 5 March 1953. I
remember thinking: why do we need to learn such exact dates, especially when a
student regurgitated the exact date a few days later. Surely it’s enough to
know 1953? But then, having learnt that date at uni all those years ago, I was
struck by how little snow there was on the ground in ‘Moscow’ for the start of
March. Hey, but allow the film-makers a bit of dramatic licence, huh?
So well done, Iannucci. With The Death of Stalin, you have
won be back as a fan.
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