Waiting for the Barbarians (8 page)

Looking back at the
Spider-Man
fiasco, it’s possible to see the contours of a familiar story: a woman of great talent, tremendous artistic ambition, and then humiliation. In the end, Julie Taymor got her Greek drama. Like a character in some Attic play, she was led by a
single-minded passion to betray her truest self and abandon her greatest virtues. These, as her admirers have long recognized and she herself once seemed to know, lie not in elaborate Hollywood special effects that huge amounts of money can buy in order to make the fantastical seem real and persuasive, but in a very old-fashioned kind of magic that doesn’t pretend to be “real” at all. Taymor told an interviewer an interesting story once about a wonderful idea you get to see played out in
The Lion King
: her insistence that the puppeteers operating the animal figures not be concealed. She recalls telling Michael Eisner, the Disney chief to whom she was trying to sell this notion:

“How it’s being told” is what great directors excel at, and what Taymor herself has done wonderfully well in the past, on a shoestring. (“The most successful stuff is the stuff I’ve done my whole life, which didn’t cost anything.”) In
Spider-Man
, by contrast, she spent the huge amounts of money available to her on the “masking”—on making it look like the heroes were flying, on making it all look real. In the end, the metamorphosis that Taymor tried so disastrously to effect in the show was to transform the proscenium into a silver screen—to make a play that was, essentially, a blockbuster movie.

Talk about tragic irony. At the end of the interview she gave to Schechner, Taymor boasted of what she had been able to accomplish “with no budgets,” theatrical miracles that “have
more
power because they are so transparent, so simple.” Back then, when she gave the interview, in the first flush of her success with
The Lion King
, she seemed to know who she was and what she wanted to do. And, of course, what she’d never dream of doing. “I never had theater producers run after me,” she told Schechner. “Some people want to make more Broadway shows out of movies. But Elliot”—Goldenthal, her partner, who composes the music for many of her shows and films—“Elliot and I aren’t going to do
Batman: The Musical
.”

—The New York Review of Books
, May 12, 2011

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH
Alexander Sokurov’s extraordinary 2002 film
Russian Ark
, a movie that takes the form of a surreal tour of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, a woman who’s holding forth about a certain painting pauses to observe that “there are so many symbols we can only guess about.” Indeed. The painting in question, Van Dyck’s
Virgin with the Partridges
, is, to be sure, enigmatic. But by the time you’ve gotten this far into Sokurov’s film—with its unchronological tableaux of pre-Revolutionary moments (a glimpse of Nicholas and Alexandra at tea with their children is followed by a ball given by Alexander I), its jarring juxtapositions of imperial grandeur and human crudity (Catherine the Great hurrying away from a lavish private performance because, as she cries out, she must have a “piss”), its unsettling repetitions (one long scene is reprised in toto), and its many surreal gestures (the woman lecturing on Van Dyck happens to be blind)—you can’t help thinking that the remark about unfathomable symbols is meant to refer to the film itself. Despite the smoothness of its surface—the result, not least, of the fact that it was shot in
one unbroken take, the longest in film history—the movie is nonetheless continuously ruffled by jagged intrusions of elements that are ostensibly inexplicable but clearly, somehow, meaningful. Small wonder that another character in
Russian Ark
stops at one point to ask himself, “Is this a dream?”

Dreams, as it happens, fill the movies of Sokurov. “Last night I had a dream” are the first words spoken in
Mother and Son
, the 1997 feature that made the director’s international reputation. (He had begun in the 1970s as a documentarian and then became a disciple of Andrei Tarkovsky, some of whose intensely devotional, meditative style Sokurov absorbed while giving it a secular, psychologizing, oneiric cast.) An almost unbearably intense, virtually wordless study of the final hours of a terminally ill middle-aged woman whose son has come, perhaps a little reluctantly, to be with her, that film begins with a dialogue between the immobile, recumbent mother and the handsome young son about the dreams and nightmares they have both been having. “That means we have the same dreams!” the son concludes. “Yes, we do,” the mother exhaustedly responds.

The film’s companion piece, the unsettlingly homoerotic
Father and Son
(2003), also begins with a dream—a bad one, in this case: we first hear, and then see, a teenage boy moaning in distress as he gradually wakes from a nightmare in his father’s arms. (They are both naked; the nature of the moaning is not, at first, entirely clear.) Later on, the father remarks that his son’s dreams “are getting out of hand,” a conclusion with which it is hard to disagree, given that the boy nearly kills the father in his dream—a not-too-subtle expression of his submerged yearning to move out of the overprotective father’s apartment and start his own life.

“All is like a dream,” intones the narrator of
Oriental Elegy
(1996), an eerie, fog-shrouded fantasy about a Japanese island whose denizens, interviewed at length by a narrator, seem to be ghosts. A documentary
that Sokurov made the following year,
A Simple Life
, which meticulously records a day in the life of a solitary Japanese woman, a kimono-maker living in a secluded village, cannot help alluding to this favorite motif: “Dear Hiroko,” the narrator begins, mysteriously quoting a letter whose provenance is never explained, “last night I had no dreams, but did I sleep or was it already nonexistence?”

And then there is
Russian Ark
, which—as sometimes happens in dreams—constantly and disorientingly worries whether it is dreaming itself. “Is this a dream?” asks the character whom we might call the film’s protagonist: Astolphe de Custine, the aristocratic French historian of Russian autocracy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, whose stork-like, black-clad figure somewhat bemusedly leads us through the Hermitage while stopping to chat, now and then, with various passersby: early-nineteenth-century partygoers, late-twentieth-century visitors to the museum, it makes no difference to him as long as he gets to toss off barbed comments about history and politics and art. (“Russians are so talented at copying, because you don’t have ideas of your own. Your authorities don’t want you to have any.”) When the Custine of Sokurov’s film, who is rather sentimental about the past—“everyone can see the future but nobody remembers the past,” he grumbles at one point—is sternly reminded by the twentieth-century narrator that “monarchy isn’t eternal,” the marquis playfully replies, “Don’t I have the right to dream a little?” To which the narrator, just as playfully but with a certain pointedness too, retorts: “Dream away!”

This tart acknowledgment that there is a gulf between dreams (Custine’s, and the film’s, willful decision to look only at the imperial past) and reality (that past is irretrievably lost) is an important reminder that Sokurov’s dreams are more than soft and “poetic” reveries, pretty pictures meant to evoke pleasant nostalgia. As with dreams, his images and narratives always suggest other, hidden truths: these
surfaces invite, even require, interpretation. The way the young man in
Mother and Son
keeps looking at a plume of smoke from a train that keeps mysteriously passing, the way the director constantly bends and stretches certain other images, suggest that the emotions in play here are a good deal more complex, and a good deal darker, than the ideal love that some critics see as the movie’s subject.

Sokurov’s penchant for turning away from our waking understanding of our lives in favor of the truths that reverie can reveal is even more important for certain of his films that have larger perspectives, and larger ambitions. These films include not only his masterpiece,
Russian Ark
, with its poignant exploration of historical nostalgia, but also
Moloch
(1999), a fantasy that follows Hitler, Eva Braun, and some guests during a day’s retreat at Berchtesgaden, and
Taurus
(2001), an eccentrically imaginative reconstruction of Lenin’s last days—the first two installments of a planned tetralogy about twentieth-century autocrats, of which
The Sun
, about Hirohito’s last day as a god, is the third. (Released abroad in 2005, it had its US premiere only at the end of 2009.) It is the profoundest and aesthetically the most satisfying of his excursions into biography, films in which his preoccupation with dreams serves what may be his real interest: history.

Or, rather, a very specific facet of history. At a showing of
The Sun
at the Berlin Film Festival, Sokurov declared that he is not interested in the “events or the period” when he makes a historical movie. The facts of history are not what he wants to evoke: these correspond to the waking reality for which, in so many films, he has shown little interest.

Instead, he explained—and this is hardly surprising in someone who came of age in the stagnant final days of the Soviet regime—Sokurov
is interested in exploring the gap that opens up between human realities and what he calls the “theater” of ideological performances. He elucidated this notion in Berlin when asked about
Moloch
, a movie whose effectiveness, in great part, derives from the contrasts between the awesome, fortress-like scale of the Berchtesgaden redoubt and the grandiosity of the ceremony that envelops Hitler and his party, on the one hand, and, on the other, the grotesque baseness of “Adi” and Eva’s antics—naked gymnastics on the balcony, slapstick kicks in the buttocks, impromptu wrestling matches, etc. “These people, the people of power, turned their lives into theater … subordinated their behavior to rituals and ceremonies,” the director said.

Moloch
is haunted by this tension between impressive outward show and inner realities. One intimate scene between Eva and Adi begins in his bathroom with Eva noticing some stains on his dress uniform; “they come from the body,” the whiny, hypochondriacal Hitler mournfully observes. This telling reference to the difference between bodies and the clothes that cover them inspires the most pointed line in the movie: a moment later, Eva suddenly looks at her lover with disgust and says, “Without an audience, you’re no better than a corpse.” For Sokurov, a survivor of the Soviet system, to grandiosely enact history—to sacrifice humanity to ideology—is to be emptied of life itself.

Anxieties about role-playing and the tension between public personae and private realities, between the large events that constitute “history” and the rich if often irretrievable humanity beneath them, are at the core of
Russian Ark
, whose extraordinary atmosphere of wistful tenderness—in contrast to the equally extraordinary atmosphere of repellent crudeness that characterizes
Moloch
—results, not least, from the fact that most of its subjects are not the
makers of history but comparatively ordinary people—the anonymous courtiers, the nameless partygoers and dinner guests and stewards and musicians. (When the movie does train its eye on the tsars and tsaritsas, what we see are their private rather than public faces.) “Are we supposed to be playing a role?” Custine nervously asks the cameraman at one point; but the point of
Russian Ark
is to focus, again, on what lay behind the elaborate roles and enactments that constituted life at the Winter Palace during the Imperial era.

The film announces this preoccupation from the start. It begins with a black screen and a voice-over by the never-identified narrator, who may well be Sokurov; he seems to be regaining consciousness after some kind of “accident” that, you strongly feel, is meant to refer to the Revolution and the Soviet period. (“Everyone ran to safety as best they could.”) Then, as an image comes into focus, history yields to human pleasures: we see a gaggle of well-dressed revelers—it seems to be the early part of the nineteenth century—looking for a grand party. As the camera/narrator starts to follow this dashing group through a series of twisting passageways and staircases and then into the sumptuous galleries of what had been the Winter Palace, we catch glimpses of another kind of history—one that, as in
Moloch
, is not, for the most part, the history we read about in history books.

Instead, Sokurov’s camera glides past and through a series of remarkably staged tableaux, astonishingly overflowing with magnificent period dress, of lost, minor, or forgotten moments, as if to remind us that most of the history lurking behind the Hermitage and its collections—and much of the history before “the accident”—was composed of unremarkable, human moments. Here again, the emphasis is on the contrast between the magnificence of the “theater” and the smallness of the people required to play their roles. (Sometimes
literally: while Catherine watches the ballet, the camera shows us the performers lounging in the wings. That was history, too.) One set piece concerns an opulent diplomatic ceremony in which the Persian ambassador to the court of Nicholas I formally apologizes for the murder of Russian envoys in Tehran (“His Majesty has sent me to erase from memory this event,” the Persian prince announces, tellingly). But the camera’s attention is focused less on the ceremony than on the courtiers who stand fidgeting and gossiping. “A terrible boredom will set in,” Custine sighs as he leaves the reception room to inspect the Sèvres porcelain at the reception that will follow. The boredom was also part of the story.